Suu Kyi’s party heads for landslide win in Myanmar

Aung San Suu Kyi’s party said on Monday that it had won 56 of the 57 parliamentary seats from Myanmar’s Yangon, a result that portends a massive sweep in historic elections that could eventually give it the presidency next year.

The National League for Democracy announced that it had won 44 of the 45 Lower House seats and all 12 of the Upper House seats from Yangon, a party stronghold, in Sunday’s general election. It also won 87 of the 90 seats in the Yangon state legislature. Elections for regional parliaments were held simultaneously.

Myanmar’s ruling party conceded defeat as the Opposition appeared on course for a landslide victory that could ensure it forms the next government. “We lost,” Union Solidarity and Development Party acting chairman Htay Oo said.

As the results were announced at the NLD’s headquarters in Yangon, huge cheers broke out among the crowd of red-shirted supporters, mindful that Myanmar may finally be freeing itself from the stranglehold of the military, which ruled the country for a half-century until 2011 and continued to wield influence through a quasi-civilian government afterward.

Aung Kyaw Kyaw, a 29-year-old pharmacist, said he didn’t vote for the ruling party because “they were only former military people. If I voted for them, that means I am asking my own enemy to come back into my life”.

The Yangon result was not announced by the government’s Union Election Commission, but the NLD has stationed representatives at counting centres and is keeping tallies that are being relayed to its headquarters.

The election commission has been slow in releasing the numbers.

Earlier, Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and pro-democracy icon, urged supporters not to provoke losing rivals who mostly represent the former junta that ruled this Southeast Asian nation for a half-century.