By Evereth Woodruff 
Myanmar’s military regime has staged a cosmetic makeover in recent days. On July 30, the State Administration Council (SAC) junta transformed into the State Security and Peace Commission (SSPC), ending a four-and-a-half-year state of emergency as preparations began for a year-end general election.
After years of speculation following the February 2021 military coup, the junta’s “transition plan” is taking its misshapen form. There will likely be some measure of international interest in the SSPC’s evolving plans to hold polls in the midst of a nationwide civil war, but there shouldn’t be any hope that a pseudo-election can solve the conflict.
How will Myanmar’s revolutionary complex respond to the regime’s plans? So far, the response from the exiled National Unity Government (NUG) has been muted. There has been no official reaction, not even the obligatory ridicule that such steps should evoke, either by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) or the Acting President’s office.
The National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), which includes multiple ethnic political actors and strike committees, has likewise been silent.
The Joint Anti-Sham Elections Working Committee of the NUG and NUCC set the tone in an October 2024 statement to reject the elections: “we will not accept any political paths which have been based on 2008 constitution, including the planned census process of military and the sham election.”
The late-2024 “nationwide census” was a ham-fisted process by the SAC to establish a population count as a precursor to eventual polls. The census results claimed to have enumerated a total population of “51,316,756, including 32,191,407 from the census and 19,125,349 from estimated data.” This is voodoo data of meaningless exactitude.
The elections will almost certainly be as clumsy and unconvincing as the census. The SSPC’s Union Election Commission (UEC) has already registered some 55 political parties. The absurd-looking and sounding Myanmar Electronic Voting Machine (MEVM) is being trialed across the country in regime-controlled urban centers.
The same grievances of massive electoral malfeasance in November 2020, with some 13 million fake votes, which undergird the regime’s justification for the coup, are as absurdly unconvincing now as every time junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing mentions them in his meandering speeches.
The National League for Democracy (NLD) won those elections indisputably, during a pandemic, and the vote reflected not just Aung San Suu Kyi’s broad popularity but the rejection of the military, as the vote likewise reflected in 2015.
However, the dilemma for anti-military revolutionary forces is the elections could elicit creeping, if grudging, endorsement. China, Russia and India will merrily support the elections and buy the facile claim that they are an imperfect passage out of the political impasse.
Most Western embassies will publicly decry the elections, but many are also interested in what potential openings could emerge to normalize relations with whatever permutation of regime comes next. If the elections preparation plans are met with increased violence by revolutionary forces, it will make it easier for Western states to shift their positions to support the process.
Even with the recent news that the SSPC has hired (again) a Washington DC-based public relations firm to improve their image, there is little bandwidth in American foreign policy, or Western diplomacy writ large, to substantially reject the SSPC’s election plans.
And US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s directive to American diplomats to “avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question” could set a general Western diplomatic tone of elections fatalism.
There should be little dispute that revolutionary diplomacy has not made much of an impact in over four years. This is in large part down to a rapidly changing world order, where multiple crises, including the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians, the grinding war in Ukraine, the state collapse in Sudan, the retreat of the Western aid regime and Donald Trump’s war against the international system of norms and rational statecraft.
Post-coup Myanmar may still garner some measure of concern and international media attention, but the tools of conflict resolution, from the recidivist failures of the Association of South East Asia Nations (ASEAN) to Julie Bishop, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy, are all unfortunately low-performing efforts.
The NUG and NUCC especially have come under sustained criticism in the past two years for their uneven performance, ineffectual leadership, especially in foreign affairs, and inability to wrest the initiative away from the regime.
Yet it is important in the lead-up to the election to compare the real progress of domestic political mobilization by revolutionary forces across Myanmar with the thoroughly illegitimate fumbling of Min Aung Hlaing’s regime.
The first phase of political mobilization was the Federal Democracy Charter (FDC), drafted in March 2021, soon after the coup. Next came “bottom-up federalism”, where emerging federal units in Karenni, Sagaing and Karen took the lead from top-down grand designs for a future Myanmar.
These bottom-up initiatives continue in spite of talk of elections, with the formation of the Ta-ang Land Council in early June, along with the “liberation” of major territory in almost all of Rakhine state by the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) and large parts of Kachin State by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).
Another vehicle is the Articles of Federal Transitional Arrangement (AFTA) created by the NUG, NUCC and EAOs with the objectives of “ending the involvement of the Myanmar military in politics, placing armed forces under civilian government, fully abolishing the 2008 constitution and eradicating all its remnants, drafting and enacting a constitution based on a federal and democratic system accepted by all relevant parties, constructing a new union through this framework, and ensuring justice for victims of injustices during conflicts.”
AFTA is the result of months of painstaking consultations amongst all these groups and reflects the hard work of many Myanmar governance experts. Even with the multiple challenges these initiatives face, they deserve to be at the center of any elections discourse as legitimate alternatives to the Myanmar military’s farcical process.
However, revolutionary international diplomacy is still floundering as the elections near. On June 14, the Joint Coordinating Body (JCB) was announced, with a number of EAOs, the NUG and other political actors, including some political parties that chose not to register for the military’s planned elections.
The JCB was formed to “strengthen collective coordination among pro-democracy stakeholders and to build a unified, strategic front in addressing both immediate crises and the broader objective of federal democratic transformation.”
But is the JCB simply rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic? Even with all the political will the JCB can muster, and the sophistication of the organizations involved, is there a receptive international audience that can respond to their reinvigorated platform? What is the plan for discrediting the elections?
One important readjustment must eschew the hope and assumption that the military system will inevitably collapse. But there is very little deeper thinking around how and why the military could possibly collapse, or any plan if it comes to pass.
Ahead of the election, at least on the battlefield, the Myanmar military is not just holding on, but actively clawing back territory it lost during Operation 1027. The recapture of Nawngkhio in northern Shan state from the Ta-ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) in July was just one of several examples. In the months leading up to the elections, the regime could well try and militarily regain as much territory as it can to establish more credibility for the process.
There are two potential scenarios ahead of the elections. The first is that the SSPC conjures up past game plans. That could include the release of prominent political prisoners, perhaps even Suu Kyi and NLD leaders, redoubling efforts to split revolutionary networks by offering various concessions to armed groups, and economic inducements to agree to ceasefires. All with a view to soften international perceptions of the elections.
The second broad scenario, and the most likely, is that the reconstituted regime stays just as controlling, abusive and unreconstructed as it has since the coup, and actually chooses to intensify pressure ahead of the elections. This could generate even more animus from a beleaguered population. But the regime likely assumes that a resumed popular uprising against the elections is unlikely.
All in all, the unfolding election plan is a pathetic gambit. It is up to the varied revolutionary forces to better convince the world of that reality.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar