Myanmar election enters final stage amid airstrikes and exclusions | Myanmar
Polling stations for the final phase of Myanmar’s three-phase election opened on Sunday; It’s a one-sided vote widely disparaged as fraudulent, with politicians jailed, the main opposition party banned and clashes continuing in parts of the country.
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing defended the vote as “free and fair” and presented it as a return to democracy and stability. The elections come almost five years after the military seized power in a coup, ousting Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government and triggering a violent conflict. The 80-year-old has been detained since his dismissal and his party has been banned.
The UN, human rights experts and some western governments rejected the election as lacking legitimacy.
Tom Andrews, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, said the vote was staged by the military to ensure a landslide by its political proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).
“The junta is counting on world fatigue, hoping that the international community will accept military rule in civilian clothes,” he said. “Governments should not allow this”
According to the Associated Press, 21 people were killed and 28 were injured in a military airstrike on a village in Kachin state where people displaced from the northern Bhamo district were sheltering, just a few days before the vote. Voting will be held in Bhamo on Sunday.
A total of 57 parties are running, but only six are running nationwide, and analysts say none of the parties on the ballot represent anti-military sentiments. USDP is leading the largest number of candidates so far.
According to election monitoring group Anfrel, 57 percent of the parties competing in the 2020 general election no longer exist, despite receiving more than 70 percent of the vote and 90 percent of the seats.
Malaysia said the regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), would not approve the survey or send observers. However, it is unclear whether member states will increase their relations with Myanmar’s leadership after the vote. China, a key military ally, supports elections that it sees as a path to stability.
The selection was carried out in three stages; The first phase was held in December and the second phase was held in early January. In the early stages of voting in Yangon, turnout appeared to be lower than normal, and the pre-election period lacked the large rallies and excitement of previous votes. Many voters in Yangon did not want media interviews, saying it was not safe to discuss politics openly.
A new election protection law was passed in July under which any criticism of the vote could lead to a minimum of three years in prison or even the death penalty.
The votes are being held in populous cities such as Mandalay and Yangon, but analysts estimate that about a third of the country’s territory is excluded from the process because it is under the control of anti-junta groups or is gripped by fighting.
The military coup in 2021 triggered a violent conflict that continues to rage across the country, with various opposition groups fighting against junta rule. Acled, which tracks conflicts globally, described it as “the world’s most fragmented conflict” and placed the country second on its conflict index, which measures conflicts by their lethality, danger to civilians, geographic spread and number of armed groups involved.
Su Mon, Acled’s senior analyst for Asia Pacific, said the military tried to portray the elections as a controlled exit from political crisis and conflict, but its counter-attacks only increased as the vote approached. “The military continued repeated airstrikes against civilian areas throughout 2025 in an effort to regain territory, leading to the highest number of airstrikes and related deaths in any year since 2021,” he said.
Estimates of the death toll from Myanmar’s post-coup conflict vary, although Acled has recorded 92,000 deaths since 2021.
Su Mon said: “As the final round of elections approaches, there are several inevitable outcomes: The junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party will win the election in a landslide, and the conflict will continue to escalate further.”
