The governing party of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has won enough parliamentary seats to form the next government, official results showed on Friday, in a poll disputed by the military-aligned opposition and criticised by rights groups. Al Jazeera reports
According to the latest batch of results from Sunday’s vote, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) has secured the 322 seats in the bicameral legislature needed to form a government.
The NLD has taken 346 seats of the 412 seats that have been declared, with results from 64 more yet to be announced. The governing party declared earlier this week that its own tallies showed it had won a landslide victory.
“People clearly realised the need for the NLD to get enough votes to form a government on their own,” NLD spokesman Myo Nyunt told the AFP news agency, adding this would help “minimise political conflict”.
Confirmation of the comfortable win will be a welcome boost for Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate who has had a turbulent first term marked by a brutal 2017 crackdown on the ethnic Rohingya that is now the subject of a genocide investigation, a failure to make significant headway on the country’s myriad ethnic conflicts and now the coronavirus.
The main opposition party, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), had won 24 seats, according to the partial official results.
The USDP raised objections to the poll on Wednesday and demanded a new vote as soon as possible “in order to have an election that is free, fair, unbiased and free from unfair campaigning”.
A USDP spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.
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