Secular Café: What will happen following Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory?

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What will happen following Aung San Suu Kyi's victory? Apr 7th 2012, 05:21 Remember that she won before and it was snatched away from her. http://www.economist.com/node/21552232 Quote: THE boisterous, joyful scenes throughout the evening of April 1st outside the headquarters in Yangon of the National League for Democracy (NLD) said it all. Myanmar's main opposition party was on course for a huge victory in the day's historic by-elections. Every ten minutes or so news of yet another unfeasibly good result would be posted up on a digital display screen facing the street, provoking even more ecstatic cheering from the huge crowd gathered outside. These were extraordinary scenes in a country that just over a year ago was a hushed and fearful military dictatorship. Over the following days the government confirmed the NLD's landslide. The party contested 44 of the 45 seats on offer to the federal parliament in Naypyidaw. These were the first elections it had taken part in since 1990, and it won 43 of them (the government's single win came in a constituency where the NLD candidate was disqualified). The result surpassed the party's most optimistic expectations. In some seats they seem to have won over 90% of the vote, including in a hardscrabble constituency on the edge of the capital, where hardly a vote was cast against Aung San Suu Kyi... ...The victory is more symbolic than practical. The NLD won only 6% of the 650-odd seats in parliament. Its participation will make little legislative difference, and the army remains very much in charge. One NLD leader, Tin Oo, hopes that the mere presence of Miss Suu Kyi in parliament will shake things up, and that her oratory will change some minds. Maybe, but the 2008 constitution reserves a quarter of the seats for army-appointed MPs who know exactly where to take their orders from. Rather, it is to the 2015 general election that everyone is now looking. The previous vote, in late 2010, was heavily rigged in favour of the USDP, which won most of the seats, if only because the NLD boycotted the poll. Were Sunday's by-election results repeated at the national level, the USDP would be annihilated, reduced to a parliamentary rump of its unelected military MPs. At that point, the game would pretty much be up for the army. The NLD and opposition parties from the areas of the ethnic Karen, Kachin and others would have a majority and Miss Suu Kyi, perhaps, would be president.

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