Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) sees little chance of an overwhelming victory in national elections scheduled for 8 November a party leader said on Wednesday according to a report by RFA on 29 July.
“We don’t expect a result from this election like the result we got in 2010,” USDP General Secretary Maung Maung Thein told reporters at a press conference in Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon.
“But we do expect that we will be able to form a government based on the election’s results,” he said.
November’s polls are being seen as a key test for Myanmar as it struggles with democratic reforms introduced after the USDP came to power following a 2010 ballot that the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) boycotted, and which was widely seen as neither free nor fair.
Reports suggest that voter registration during the 2010 elections was manipulated in favour of the USDP, which consists largely of retired generals and members loyal to Myanmar’s former military regime.
Noting that Myanmar’s President Thein Sein has not yet announced that he will run for a new term as president, Maung Maung Thein said that the USDP has not selected a candidate to represent Thein Sein’s own constituency in the country’s parliament.