heavily restricted<\/a> election on Sunday is taking place in about a third of the Southeast Asian nation\u2019s 330 townships, with large areas inaccessible amid a raging civil war between the military and an array of opposition forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFollowing the initial phase, two rounds of voting will be held on January 11 and January 25, while voting has been cancelled in 65 townships altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis means that at least 20 percent of the country is disenfranchised at this stage,\u201d said Al Jazeera\u2019s Tony Cheng, reporting from Myanmar\u2019s largest city, Yangon. \u201cThe big question is going to be here in the cities, what is the turnout going to be like?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Yangon, polling stations opened at 6am on Sunday (23:30 GMT, Saturday), and once the sun was up, \u201cwe\u2019ve seen a relatively regular flow of voters come in,\u201d said Cheng.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut the voters are generally middle aged, and we haven\u2019t seen many young people. When you look at the ballot, there are only few choices. The vast majority of those choices are military parties,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The election has been derided by critics \u2013 including the United Nations, some Western countries and human rights \u2060groups \u2013 as an exercise that is not free, fair or credible, with anti-military political parties not competing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was deposed by the military \u200bmonths after her National League for Democracy (NLD) won the last general election by a landslide in 2020, remains in detention, and her party has been dissolved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Al Jazeera: Polls have opened in Myanmar\u2019s first general election since the country\u2019s military toppled Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s democratically elected government in a 2021 coup. The heavily restricted election on Sunday is taking place in about a third of the Southeast Asian nation\u2019s 330 townships, with large areas inaccessible amid a raging civil war between the military and an array of opposition forces. Following the initial phase, two rounds of voting will be held on January 11 and January 25, while voting has been cancelled in 65 townships altogether. \u201cThis means that at least 20 percent of the country… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53788,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53785"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53787,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53785\/revisions\/53787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}