The forgotten local elections in Myanmar

Myanmar (Burma) held its most historic elections in November 2015 where the world famous Nobel Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a large majority. These elections mark an important step away from five decades of military rule, and have received enormous attention by the international media and by scholars, development agencies and foreign investors around the world. Largely forgotten in this picture is the state of local democracy and village level governance.

As everyone’s eyes were focused on how the new democratically elected national government would be formed, the (still) military-governed General Administrative Department demanded that local elections should be held within just a few weeks. At the end of January 2016, two months before the new government took office, elections of village tract and urban ward administrators took place across the country. Very few national newspapers covered these elections, and in stark contrast to the national elections, there was no electoral support and hardly any observers. This is critical because such local administrators are, in most localities, the primary point of contact between the state and citizens: they are invested with considerable powers, playing key roles in local development, law and order, dispute resolution, and land administration.

How local administrators are elected and how they govern is essential to the wider democratization process in Myanmar. Democracy also relies on political changes at the most local level and in everyday state-citizen interactions.

Based on these considerations, DIIS co-organized a roundtable to debate the local elections in collaboration with Yangon University, the Australian National University, and Enlightened Myanmar Research (EMR). The meeting took place on 6 April at Yangon University and brought together a group of scholars and consultants with empirical insights from the local elections. Prominent international election experts and representatives from the media and civil society also participated.

The roundtable revealed large variety in how the elections were held, low voter participation, as well as a lack of democratic principles and civil society participation. Nonetheless, the election of local administrators is still a step towards increased democratization, as these authorities were previously appointed by higher tiers of the military-government. The future of local democracy now depends on a much broader political reform process that includes the decentralization of powers and the introduction of universal suffrage in local government elections. Finally the roundtable emphasized that in the ethnic minority areas, governed by ethnic armed organizations, entirely different systems of local governance prevail.