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  Suu Kyi MPs to form government today

Suu Kyi MPs to form government today

AP/AFP
Published : Feb 1, 2016, 5:37 am IST
Updated : Feb 1, 2016, 5:37 am IST

After decades of struggle, hundreds of legislators from Aung San Suu Kyi’s camp will form Myanmar’s ruling party on Monday, with enough seats in Parliament to choose the first democratically-elected g

After decades of struggle, hundreds of legislators from Aung San Suu Kyi’s camp will form Myanmar’s ruling party on Monday, with enough seats in Parliament to choose the first democratically-elected government since the military took power in 1962.

The National League for Democracy won some 80 per cent of elected seats in November’s historic vote, but the junta-drafted Constitution means it will have to share power with the Army that for years has suppressed, often brutally, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and her allies.

The first sitting of the NLD-dominated Parli-ament is another step in Myanmar’s drawn-out transition which started with the election and will go on until the NLD government officially starts its term in April.

“We are likely to announce the President in the second week of February,” said Win Htein, a senior member of the party.

Other NLD officials said the presidential nomination process may begin towards the end of January.

This week, the party will focus on appointing parliamentary speakers, who were announced last week.

It is going to be a new era for Ms Suu Kyi’s novice MPs. Tin Thit, a poet, editor, activist — and now newly-elected MP — is among hundreds of political newcomers poised to take their seats on Monday in the country’s most democratic legislature in generations.

“This is our era,” the newly-minted NLD legislator said on Saturday. “This is our responsibility. We will just do the job we have to do,” he said.

Many of the NLD MPs have served prison time in Myanmar’s long struggle for democratic change. They are a diverse bunch, counting singers, lawyers and businessmen among their ranks. But few have any experience of the cut and thrust of Myanmar’s complex parliamentary process.

They will need to show the country’s 51 million people that they can deliver the “change” that was virtually the sole message of Ms Suu Kyi’s triumphant election bid. And that will not be easy.