Half-hearted Concessions? The Controlled Political Change and Post-Junta Politics in Burma/Myanmar

If Myanmar’s transformation from a durable military regime to a liberalizing semi-civilian government in 2010 was a surprise, the supermajority victory of the pro-democracy National League for Democracy (NLD) in the 2015 general elections has emerged as a bigger enigma. In a process widely seen as a controlled transition with plenty of authoritarian space for manipulation, the former incumbent Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which served as the electoral vehicle for Myanmar’s generals to enter civilian politics, dismally failed to repeat the favored outcomes of 2010. This paper examines the factors that led the USDP to lose the 2015 elections, albeit the administrative resources and the support from the military. It explores the reasons why the incumbents did not massively intervene or intervened differently in the democratic camp’s activities. The paper argues that the regime’s internationally outward-looking attitude and personality-centered image-making, overconfidence, inept political maneuvering, and intra-elite struggle produced the defeat. Since the confidence of the former authoritarian rulers in Myanmar stems no less from the constitutional arrangement and other institutional trappings, the country’s prospects for democratization increasingly lies beyond the formal and electoral processes. It follows that the public needs to be engaged correctly and that sub-national autonomy must be reconfigured.