Suu Kyi celebration

Hundreds of people took to the streets of Myanmar's main city, Yangon, on Sunday to celebrate the election of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Her National League for Democracy (NLD) party announced that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would take public office for the first time.

The NLD reportedly won all of the 44 seats it contested in the election, with a total of 45 seats up for grabs in the ballot. Suu Kyi, meanwhile, secured over 90 percent of the vote in the Kawhmu constituency, according to NLD official Soe Win. The official results were expected within a week.

"There are many reports of the NLD winning and winning," Suu Kyi said in a statement. "This should be a victory of the people with dignity. I would like all NLD followers and members to avoid aggressive speech or gloating."

Suu Kyi supporters celebrated in the streets, chanting "NLD, NLD" and "we won, we won" on Sunday evening.

No major changes in parliament

Voters lined up early in the day to cast their ballots in the elections to fill just 45 vacant seats in the 664-seat national parliament, in which the army-backed ruling party will continue to enjoy a vast majority.

"People were happy to vote because they stayed home from earlier elections that the NLD boycotted in 2010," Robert Tofani, a journalist in Rangoon who has covered Southeast Asia since 2004 told DW. "People are eager to express their choice and they are eager to express their emotion. There was dancing and shouting. All the city is happy."

The NLD won some 80 percent of the vote in a 1990 election, but the generals who ruled the country, which was formerly known as Burma, did not recognize the result.

Suu Kyi: Not a free campaign

On Friday, Suu Kyi said campaigning for Sunday's vote could not be considered "genuinely free and fair" but stopped short of announcing a boycott. However, Suu Kyi, who was kept under house arrest for nearly 20 years until just days after the last elections in 2010, also added that Sunday's poll had the potential to be the first step on the path of national reconciliation.

"I'd like to be one of those who are working to unite this country in a way in which all the ethnic nationalities would be able to live peacefully and happily with one another," she said ahead of the election.

The NLD charged the Electoral Commission of "rampant irregularities," including that wax on ballots could be rubbed off to change a vote and that people's names were missing from voter lists.

"I was in a township outside Yangon, where about 500 people out of 1,500 could not find their name on the voter lists," Tofani said.

Small teams of officials from the European Union, the United States, Australia and the Association of South East Asian Nations were permitted to enter Myanmar shortly ahead of the elections, though they did so as "visitors" not official "election observers."

"Any irregularities we saw in the polling stations did not seem to be out of bad will or intentions," Malgorzata Wasilewska, who heads the EU Democracy Support and Elections division, told journalists. "It was more lack of experience or knowledge."

Government needs Suu Kyi?

Some observers said they believe Myanmar's government wanted Suu Kyi to have a seat in parliament to bolster its image as a reform-oriented administration and to ease sanctions imposed by the West. The United States and European Union have said free and fair elections in Myanmar would go a long way toward convincing them to drop economic sanctions put in place against the country for human rights abuses.

A military junta ruled Myanmar for nearly 50 years before giving power to President Thein Sein, himself a former general, in 2010. Reforms introduced by Sein's government - including the release of hundreds of political prisoners, peace talks with ethnic rebels and the easing of media censorship, surprised many critics and rights groups.

Suu Kyi is in a "strategic symbiosis" with some of the country's military leadership, Maung Zarni, a Myanmar expert and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, told the AP news agency.

"They need her and she needs them to break the 25 years of political stalemate," Zarni said. "She holds the key for the regime's need for its international acceptance and normalization."

Myanmar's next general election is slated for 2015.

Author: Sean Sinico
Editor: Neil King