THE BURMESE ELECTIONS: A MASCARADE
December 2025
Editos/Fondemos’ view
FONDEMOS’ VIEW
The legislative elections the junta plans to hold in Myanmar between December 2025, and January 2026 have all the hallmarks of a hollow exercise.
Organised in three waves and covering only part of the country, the poll is designed more as a tool of security management and an attempt to legitimise a military regime than as a genuine nationwide election. Voter registration has been completed in fewer than half of Myanmar’s 330 townships; dozens have already been declared “not conducive” to voting, and many of the remaining areas are active conflict zones.
As for the character of these elections, presented by the junta as pluralistic, it has already been crushed: the National League for Democracy (NLD) which won a landslide victory in 2020, and all opposition forces have been excluded from the contest before it has even begun.
On the ground, for millions of people the right to vote is purely theoretical. Since the 2021 coup, around 3.5 million people have been displaced and nearly a third of the population is in need of humanitarian assistance. Many live under bombardments, raids and internet shutdowns. In such conditions, free registration, campaigning and voting are simply impossible.
The regime’s main backers, China and Russia, sustain this masquerade by providing technical and military support and blocking any stronger response at the UN Security Council. Myanmar’s elections must therefore be seen as a democratic façade, yet this logic still distorts perceptions: the US has just ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Burmese citizens, claiming conditions have stabilised enough for return and even describing the upcoming elections as free and fair.
This is where the European Union still has a crucial role. In a context of civil war and heavily fragmented electoral calendar, these elections cannot credibly be described as free, fair or inclusive: the European Parliament stated it will reject the polls. The real risk now is that the vote becomes the opening act of a hypocritical process, in which the junta will speak the language of reform to make the world ease pressure and move on from Myanmar rather than focusing on the worrying stage which is the aftermath of the poll.
Myanmar’s elections are not a step towards democracy, but an attempt to entrench military rule. Europe has begun to say so; it now needs to act accordingly.
The Council and Member States should therefore turn Parliament’s stance into a common line and concrete action: maintain and expand targeted sanctions on those responsible for abuses and for staging these sham elections; step up principled humanitarian assistance; and work with ASEAN, the UN and like-minded partners to reject the façade of electoral normality.
