Sawt Falasteen - Myanmar pro-military party claims huge lead in junta-run poll

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

"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.

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 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.

"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, 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 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.

E.AbuRizq--SF-PST