Five years after staging a military coup that overturned the 2020 election results and imprisoned elected leaders, including National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint, Myanmar’s junta is now attempting to legitimise its rule through elections. The poll has been denounced as a sham by the international community, with the regime’s allies — Russia, Belarus and neighbouring China — sending observers to lend it credibility.

The first phase of the poll was held on December 28, 2025, with the remaining two scheduled for early and late January. However, these polls cover only about half of Myanmar’s territory, with the rest beyond the junta’s reach due to the ongoing civil war involving the NLD-led National Unity Government’s Bamar-dominated People’s Defence Forces and ethnic armed organisations across the country.

In results that were a foregone conclusion, the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) claimed victory in nearly 80% of contested seats. The USDP fielded over 1,000 candidates, far exceeding its closest rivals’ tallies. Meanwhile, the NLD, which won landslide victories in 2015 and 2020, was deregistered along with 40 other parties. Collectively, they had won 90% of legislative seats in 2020.

Aiding the USDP’s dominance was the junta’s introduction of a proportional representation system, replacing the first-past-the-post method that had delivered the NLD’s sweeping victories. This allows the USDP to secure seats even with minimal popular support, over and above the 25% of parliamentary seats reserved for military appointees under the 2008 Constitution. In sum, this was almost a repeat of the controlled 2010 elections, but with the deck stacked even more heavily in the junta’s favour.

The USDP’s origins lie in the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), established by Senior General Than Shwe in September 1993, just months after the regime convened a National Convention to draft Myanmar’s future constitution. Than Shwe, who ruled Myanmar from 1992 to 2011, had come to power after the junta negated the NLD’s triumph in multi-party elections in 1990. Officially a social organisation aimed at “national development” and “ethnic amity”, the USDA was, in reality, designed to be the military’s civilian arm. Its vice-chairman and general secretary were retired military officers, but the post of chairman was kept empty so as not to create a parallel leader beyond the Senior General, according to a former USDP insider Ye Htut. The USDA also functioned as an organisation that conducted and promoted business under the junta’s patronage.

In 2010, following the institution of a new constitution in 2008, the USDA transformed into the USDP just before elections that would bring a quasi-civilian government to power. Ex-general Thein Sein was elected president in polls boycotted by the NLD and widely derided as rigged. In genuinely contested elections in 2015 and 2020, however, the USDP suffered humiliating defeats, losing even in its stronghold of the national capital, Naypyitaw.

Strategic instrument

In a way, the USDP is a successor to the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) that ruled Myanmar under a one-party dictatorship led by Ne Win following a military coup in 1962. The BSPP was inseparable from the state and collapsed in 1988 following the popular 8888 uprisingthat brought down the dictatorship. The military seized power again through a coup, and ruled until 2011 with Than Shwe as leader.

The USDP, in contrast to the BSPP, functions as a strategic instrument within a multi-party system while the military retains ultimate power through constitutional guarantees. If the USDP loses, the military doesn’t collapse; it simply uses other mechanisms to maintain control, as demonstrated by the 2021 coup. Also, unlike the BSPP’s “secular” and “socialist” pretensions, the USDP seeks legitimacy in an ideological blend of Bamar and Buddhist nationalism, by aligning with radical monastic groups like MaBaTha against perceived foreign and minority threats.

The USDP’s current leader is U Khin Yi, a former senior military officer and police chief who also served as immigration minister in Thein Sein’s government. Khin Yi conducted a series of pro-military rallies before the February 2021 coup, following the junta’s false claim that the NLD’s victory was due to fraud. The rallies and the violence that followed provided the pretext for the military’s seizure of absolute power.

The party’s candidate list for the current election is packed with generals and former ministers, including former defence minister Mya Tun Oo and Prime Minister Nyo Saw. The USDP now appears to be a vehicle to transition junta leader Min Aung Hlaing into a civilian presidency, providing a legal veneer to end the state of emergency declared after the coup.

Myanmar’s dominant pro-military party claimed an overwhelming victory in the first phase of the elections, a senior party official told AFP, after democracy watchdogs warned the junta-run poll would entrench military rule.

The armed forces snatched power in a 2021 coup, but on Sunday (December 28, 2025) opened voting in a phased month-long election they pledge will return power to the people.

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“We won 82 lower house seats in townships which have finished counting, out of the total of 102,” a senior member of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) told AFP.

The figure implies that the party — which many analysts describe as a civilian proxy of the military — took more than 80 percent of the lower house seats that were put to the vote on Sunday (December 28).

It won all eight townships in the capital Naypyidaw, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose the results.

At the last poll in 2020, the USDP was trounced by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which was dissolved after the coup and did not appear on Sunday’s (December 28) ballots.

The Nobel laureate has been in detention since the putsch, which triggered a civil war.

Campaigners, Western diplomats and the United Nations’ rights chief have condemned the vote, citing a stark crackdown on dissent and a candidate list stacked with military allies.

“It makes sense that the USDP would dominate,” said Morgan Michaels, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank.

“The election is not credible,” he told AFP. “They rig it ahead of time by banning different parties, making sure that certain people don’t turn up to vote, or they do turn up to vote under threat of coercion to vote a certain way.”

Official results have yet to be posted by Myanmar’s Union Election Commission and two more phases are scheduled for January 11 and 25.

“My view on the election is clear: I don’t trust it at all,” Yangon resident Min Khant said Monday (December 29).

“We have been living under a dictatorship,” said the 28-year-old. “Even if they do hold elections, I don’t think anything good will come of them because they always lie.”

After voting on Sunday (December 28), military chief Min Aung Hlaing — who has ruled by diktat for the past five years — said the armed forces could be trusted to hand back power to a civilian-led government.

“We guarantee it to be a free and fair election,” he told reporters in Naypyidaw. “It’s organised by the military, we can’t let our name be tarnished.”

The coup triggered a civil war as pro-democracy activists formed guerrilla units, fighting alongside ethnic minority armies which have long resisted central rule.

Sunday’s (December 28) election was scheduled to take place in 102 of the country’s 330 townships — the most of the three phases of voting.

But amid the war, the military has acknowledged that elections cannot happen in almost one in five lower house constituencies.