Myanmar’s Generals Stage Long-Delayed Election, Tightening Control Through New Laws

The line to vote formed slowly outside a primary school in Mandalay on Dec. 28, 2025, the first day of Myanmar’s long-delayed general election.

Soldiers lounged in the shade by the gate. Civil servants clutched their national registration cards, some ordered there by superiors. Poll workers ticked names off voter lists compiled from a census that had never reached much of the surrounding countryside. Just a few miles away, roads were controlled by anti-junta fighters, and there were no ballot boxes at all.

Across much of the country, that contrast defined Myanmar’s first nationwide polls since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup. For Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing and his allies, the phased elections in late 2025 and January 2026 were billed as the final step in a transition back to “genuine, discipline-flourishing multiparty democracy.” For his opponents, they were the end point of a four-year project to convert raw military rule into a more durable authoritarian system built around a hollowed-out ballot.

More than any single day of voting, the path to these elections — and the laws that shaped them — show how Myanmar’s generals used the language and institutions of democracy to entrench their power.

From coup to “disciplined democracy”

The military toppled the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, detaining her and senior leaders of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and declaring a nationwide state of emergency under Article 419 of the 2008 Constitution.

That charter, drafted under a previous junta, already guaranteed the armed forces 25% of seats in parliament and control of key ministries, and gave the commander-in-chief sweeping powers in a crisis. But Min Aung Hlaing insisted the coup was temporary, accusing the NLD — without presenting credible evidence — of “massive fraud” in the November 2020 election and promising new polls after one year.

As protests turned into a nationwide uprising and then a patchwork civil war, the promised timeline slipped. The State Administration Council (SAC), as the junta styled itself, renewed emergency rule again and again, pushing past the constitution’s formal limits of one year plus two six-month extensions. Hints of elections in 2022 gave way to talk of August 2023, then an unspecified date in 2025.

All the while, state media repeated a constant refrain: Myanmar would eventually return to a “multiparty democratic system,” but only after “discipline” and “stability” were restored.

Redrawing the political map

Behind the slogans, the SAC moved to reshape who could compete.

On Jan. 26, 2023, it issued the Political Parties Registration Law, ordering all parties to reapply for legal status within 60 days or face dissolution. The law raised the bar for participation dramatically. National parties were now required to claim at least 100,000 members — later reportedly reduced to 50,000 — deposit large sums in a state-owned bank, open offices in at least half of Myanmar’s 330 townships and promise to contest no fewer than half of all constituencies.

The law also barred any organization designated as a “terrorist” or “unlawful association” from forming a party, and prohibited people with criminal convictions from serving as party members or leaders.

In practice, that language swept aside almost every significant opponent of the coup. The junta had already labeled the shadow National Unity Government (NUG) formed by ousted lawmakers, its parliamentary committee and many People’s Defence Force militias as terrorist groups. Courts under military control had sentenced Suu Kyi to decades in prison on an array of charges. Numerous NLD officials, activists and journalists carried criminal records from convictions in post-coup trials.

Human rights organizations said the law appeared designed to “crush all political opposition and derail any possible return to democratic civilian rule.” Many parties agreed. The NLD announced it would not re-register, arguing that doing so would legitimize the coup.

“We absolutely do not accept that an election will be held at a time when many political leaders and political activists have been arrested and the people are being tortured by the military,” one party lawmaker said at the time.

On March 28, 2023, the junta-controlled election commission dissolved the NLD and at least 40 other parties that failed to comply.

Simultaneously, the SAC-appointed Union Election Commission moved to change how votes would be counted. It scrapped Myanmar’s traditional first-past-the-post system in favor of closed-list proportional representation in larger, multi-member districts. Analysts said that shift would favor the military’s own Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and a cluster of small, pro-military or opportunistic ethnic parties in any contest without the NLD and other popular forces.

The new system also gave the authorities more flexibility. Because seats would be allocated by region-wide party lists, election officials could cancel or skip voting in areas deemed insecure while still claiming a national result.

Criminalizing criticism

As election talk gathered pace in 2025, the junta added another layer of legal control.

On July 29, 2025, it passed the Law on the Prevention of Obstruction, Disruption, and Sabotage of Multiparty Democratic General Election. The statute criminalized a wide range of activities that might “destroy a part of the electoral process,” including speeches, protests, organizing and distributing leaflets urging a boycott.

Basic offenses carried three to seven years in prison, rising to 20 years for attacks on election staff or candidates. If an offense led to someone’s death, the law allowed the death penalty.

Authorities quickly began using the law. State media reported that more than 220 people were charged in 140 cases ahead of the first phase of voting, including a man sentenced to seven years of hard labor over a Facebook post that criticized the election plan. Activists, artists and students were detained for stickers, pamphlets and online comments that urged people not to participate.

Voting in a fractured state

By the time the state of emergency was formally lifted on July 31, 2025, and the SAC dissolved, Myanmar’s political and territorial landscape had been transformed.

Power flowed to the constitutionally mandated National Defence and Security Council and a new State Security and Peace Commission, but Min Aung Hlaing remained at the apex as acting president and head of the commission. The military kept its guaranteed 25% share of parliamentary seats.

Outside Naypyitaw, however, the army’s grip was fraying. Independent assessments suggested the junta controlled perhaps a quarter of the country, mainly major cities and transport corridors. Powerful ethnic armed organizations — including the Kachin Independence Army in the north, the Karen National Union in the southeast and the Arakan Army in Rakhine State — had extended their reach, often in coordination with NUG-aligned militias.

A government-organized census intended to underpin voter lists failed to reach roughly 19 million of Myanmar’s estimated 51 million people, officials acknowledged, citing security problems. When the election commission scheduled voting in three stages — on Dec. 28, 2025, Jan. 11 and Jan. 25, 2026 — it openly excluded scores of conflict-hit townships.

In many others, polling stations were heavily militarized. Teachers and municipal staff reported being instructed to serve as election workers and to vote. Turnout, estimated around the mid-50% range, was far below the participation seen in 2015 and 2020.

Opposition forces tried to block the process without targeting ordinary voters. The NUG’s foreign minister, Moe Zaw Oo, said “no one from any organisation on our revolutionary forces side will accept the illegal election” and described plans to prevent it through nonviolent means where possible.

Ethnic armed groups were blunter. Statements from the Arakan Army, Kachin Independence Army, Ta’ang National Liberation Army and others described the polls as a “sham” and pledged to stop them in areas they controlled. Youth networks from Mon and Ta’ang communities called on domestic constituencies and foreign governments to boycott what they called an attempt to deceive the world.

Limited recognition, durable effects

International reaction was unusually sharp for a Southeast Asian election.

The United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar warned ahead of voting that the planned polls were a “charade” that would “deepen division and fuel further violence,” arguing that the legal and institutional changes were cosmetic while real power remained with the generals.

Southeast Asia’s regional bloc, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, had spent years trying to implement a five-point peace plan in Myanmar with little effect. In January 2025, foreign ministers from the bloc told the junta that “the election is not our priority. Our priority is to stop the violence,” stressing that any poll must be inclusive. After voting concluded, ASEAN declined to recognize or endorse the result and did not send official observers, its strongest collective rebuke since the coup.

The United States and several Western governments described the process as “so-called elections,” saying they would exacerbate instability and could not be considered free or fair while thousands of political prisoners remained behind bars and large areas were under martial law.

China, Russia and a handful of regional governments, however, continued to engage the military as Myanmar’s de facto authority and indicated they were prepared to work with whatever government emerged under the 2008 Constitution.

Inside Myanmar, the outcome left the USDP and a constellation of smaller, largely pro-military parties poised to dominate an elected chamber in which a quarter of seats are still reserved for serving officers. For many activists, that confirmed what they had argued since the first draft of the political parties law was published in 2023: that the promise of a transition was never to restore the kind of competitive politics voters experienced in 2015 and 2020.

What has emerged instead is a system in which elections, party registration and speech laws are tightly managed to keep key opponents out, while providing a civilian façade to a military that remains at war with large parts of its own population.

At the Mandalay school where voting began in December, ballot papers were eventually sealed and driven away under armed escort. In swaths of Kachin, Karen and Rakhine states, there were no papers to seal. For many in Myanmar, the question now is not when the next election will be held, but whether any vote conducted under such conditions can offer a way out of a conflict that has already reshaped the country far beyond the reach of the ballot box.