RANGOON, Burma — Supporters of Burma’s opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi broke out in euphoric cheers Sunday after her party said she won a parliamentary seat in a landmark election, setting the stage for her to take public office for the first time.
Suu Kyi’s party said she had led it to a landslide election victory. As results came in Sunday night from the poll watchers of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, party spokesman and campaign manager Nyan Win projected it would win 40 of 45 parliamentary seats at stake. It had contested 44.
No official results were expected before today. Independent verification of the vote was not possible.
The victory, if confirmed, would mark a major milestone in the Southeast Asian nation, where the military has ruled almost exclusively for a half-century and where a new government is seeking legitimacy and a lifting of Western sanctions.
It would also mark the biggest prize of Suu Kyi’s political career, and a spectacular reversal of fortune for the 66-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate whom the former junta had kept imprisoned in her lakeside home for the better part of two decades.
A digital signboard outside the National League for Democracy’s headquarters in Burma’s main city, Rangoon, announced in the late afternoon that Suu Kyi had won a seat. Supporters gathered by the thousands began wildly shouting upon learning the news, chanting, “We won! We won!” while clapping, dancing, waving red party flags and gesturing with thumbs-up and V-for-victory signs.
“I feel like I want to dance,” said Khin Maung Myint, a 65-year-old painter in the crowd. “I’m so happy that they beat the military. We need a party that stands for the people.”
But U Min Zaw, a goldsmith who also supports Suu Kyi’s party, said he realized that his vote on Sunday would go only so far - the dominance of the ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, would remain intact.
“This is just a little step, just a little democracy,” Min Zaw said. The National League for Democracy will have at best a small minority in parliament, he said. But “the future is brighter than ever.”
As more counts came in from the party’s poll watchers around the country, the crowd grew to as many as 10,000. The party’s security guards tried without success to keep the traffic flowing past the people occupying much of the road and all nearby sidewalks.
The National League for Democracy captured all four seats in the capital, Naypyitaw, said one of its senior members, Tin Oo.
Results in Naypyitaw had been hard to predict because many of its residents are civil servants and their families dependent on the government for their livelihoods, and might have favored the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party. The turnout when Suu Kyi campaigned there was noticeably smaller than elsewhere.
“It is the people’s victory! We have taught them a lesson,” said a shopkeeper who goes by the single name Thein who wore a T-shirt with Suu Kyi’s picture on the front and her party’s fighting peacock on the back.
The digital screen displaying results also flashed a message from Suu Kyi to her followers noting that they were understandably happy but should avoid gloating. She cautioned them to “Please refrain from rude behavior or actions that would make the other side unhappy.”
All results must be confirmed by the official electoral commission, which may not make an official declaration for days.
The victory claim came despite allegations by her National League for Democracy party that “rampant irregularities” had taken place on voting day. Party spokesman Nyan Win said that by midday alone the party had filed more than 50 complaints to the Election Commission.
He said most purported violations concerned waxed ballot papers that made it difficult to mark votes. There were also ballot cards that lacked the Election Commission’s seal, which would render them invalid.
Sunday’s by-election was called to fill just 45 vacant seats in Burma’s 664-seat national parliament and will not change the balance of power in a new government that is nominally civilian but still heavily controlled by retired generals. Suu Kyi and other opposition candidates would have almost no say even if they win all the seats they are contesting.
But her candidacy has resurrected hope among Burma’s downtrodden masses, who have grown up for generations under strict military rule. If Suu Kyi takes office as expected, it would symbolize a giant leap toward national reconciliation.
“She may not be able to do anything at this stage,” said one voter, Go Khehtay, who cast his ballot for Suu Kyi at Wah Thin Kha, one of the dirt poor villages in the rural constituency south of Rangoon that she is vying to represent. “But one day, I believe she’ll be able to bring real change.”
Earlier, crowds of supporters mobbed Suu Kyi as she visited a polling station in the village after spending the night there. The tiny community of3,000 farmers has no electricity or running water, and its near-total underdevelopment illustrates the profound challenges facing the country as it slowly emerges from 49 years of army rule.
Despite the reports of widespread irregularities, a confirmed victory by Suu Kyi could cheer Western powers and nudge them closer to easing economic sanctions they have imposed on the country for years.
The elections have been described by foreign governments as a barometer of democratic development in a country that only 18 months ago was ruled by a military junta, one of Asia’s most brutal dictatorships. Hundreds of foreign journalists and numerous teams of foreign observers were allowed into Burma to witness the voting, a contrast to previous years when a hermetic military government tried to keep out prying eyes.
“We’re happy with what we’ve seen,” Chheang Vun, who was observing the election for Cambodia, said Saturday in Kawhmu district. “[Burma] is now very different. In the three days we’ve been here, we have not seen military or police.”
The European Union and the United States have said that the fairness of the outcome will be crucial in determining whether they lift economic sanctions against the country.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Istanbul for a meeting on Syria, welcomed Sunday’s vote in Burma.
“It is too early to know what the progress of recent months means and whether it will be sustained,” Clinton said. “There are no guarantees about what lies ahead for the people of Burma, but after a day responding to a brutal dictator in Syria, who would rather destroy his own country than let it move toward freedom, it is heartening to be reminded that even the most repressive regime can reform and even the most closed society can open.”
Suu Kyi herself told reporters Friday that the campaigning for Sunday’s vote had been anything but free or fair, but that she was pressing forward with her candidacy because it’s “what our people want.”
“I don’t think we can consider it a genuinely free and fair election if we take into consideration what has been going on in the last couple of months,” Suu Kyi told more than 300 journalists gathered at her lakeside home in Rangoon. “But still I will be willing to work toward national reconciliation, so we will try to tolerate what has happened.”
Last year, Burma’s long-entrenched military junta handed power to a civilian government dominated by retired officers that skeptics decried as a proxy for continued military rule. But the new rulers - who came to power in a 2010 vote that critics say was neither free nor fair - have surprised the world with a wave of changes.
The government of President Thein Sein, himself a retired lieutenant general, has freed political prisoners, signed truces with rebel groups and opened a direct dialogue with Suu Kyi, who wields enough moral authority to greatly influence the Burma policy of the U.S. and other powers.
Suu Kyi’s decision to endorse Thein Sein’s changes so far and run in Sunday’s election represents a political gamble.
Once in parliament, she can seek to influence policy and challenge the government from within. But she also risks legitimizing a regime she has fought against for decades while gaining little true legislative power.
Sunday’s poll marks the first foray into electoral politics by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party since winning a landslide election victory in 1990. The military annulled those results and kept Suu Kyi in detention for much of the next two decades. The party boycotted the last vote in 2010, but in January the government amended key electoral laws, paving the way for a run in this weekend’s ballot.
Information for this article was contributed by Todd Pitman and Aye Aye Win of The Associated Press; by Thomas Fuller and Steven Lee Meyers of The New York Times; and by Daniel Ten Kate of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/02/2012