Myanmar ruling party head says expects to win Sunday poll

By Joshua Carroll

YANGON, Myanmar

The head of Myanmar’s ruling party said he expects to win Sunday’s landmark general election, contradicting an overwhelming belief that the opposition National League for Democracy will claim the most seats.

Htay Oo told Radio Free Asia that his Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) would win “between 65 and 80 percent” of the vote as millions prepared Saturday to go to the polls for what is due to be the freest election there in decades.

There is very little polling data in Myanmar, which stagnated under military rule for five decades, but Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD is considered to be by far the most popular party.

The military-backed USDP, on the other hand, is seen as widely despised.

In a 1990 election the NLD won by a landslide but the military junta annulled the result, and it won almost every seat in by-elections in 2012.

Htay Oo’s comments also contradict research compiled by USDP political advisors early this year that warned the party could win as few as 16 out 330 seats in parliament’s lower house.

The USDP came to power in a 2010 election that was regarded as rigged by Myanmar’s powerful generals. The NLD boycotted the poll.

Many USDP ministers and President Thein Sein himself are former generals who retired from the military to join the new semi-civilian regime in 2011.

The party does, however, have the support of a populist anti-Muslim movement led by Buddhist monks. And there are fears that the failings of a biased election commission, whose leader is openly supportive of the current regime, may help sway the vote in the USDP’s favor.

Nada Kyaw Zwa, a senior USDP member, also predicted overwhelming success as he addressed a campaign rally in Yangon Friday.

“I’m sure that we will win on Nov. 8. So we will no longer use the phrase ‘we will win’. Let me tell you in advance that we have won,” he said.

The NLD complained Saturday that an “additional” 11,000 voters had appeared on voting lists in a military-dominated constituency in the capital city, Naypyitaw.

Sun Win, a local party member, told the Democratic Voice of Burma that the additional names did not have addresses and that the party had asked the election commission to investigate.