Myanmar’s Fake Election Is a Trap, Not a Transition

In announcing 28 December 2025 as the first phase of nationwide elections, Myanmar’s military junta is attempting to lock the populace into a system designed more to suffocate dissent than facilitate transition. The opposition, including the National Unity Government (NUG), has fallen silent in recent weeks, realising that elections will proceed regardless of resistance. The junta, which rebranded itself the State Security and Peace Commission (SSPC) on 31 July, is banking on a measure of international and regional recognition via elections. Myanmar’s civilians and the NUG, however, face the reality of growing entrapment.

The SSPC ended the state of emergency on 31 July after four years of extensions. Some hailed this as a sign of political transition. However, within hours of ending the state of emergency, the National Defense and Security Council imposed martial law in 63 townships considered opposition strongholds. Far from loosening its grip, the junta has refocused its power, abandoning the careful choreography of the State Peace and Development Council for the 2010 elections, which at least maintained a facade of transition.

The junta has effectively gamed the system in its favour, in terms of institutional electoral mechanisms and a legal framework to enforce repression. The Union Election Commission (UEC) remains toothless. To begin with, the UEC was never fully independent. The military reappointed the UEC with new members after the 2021 coup. The new UEC subsequently endorsed the military’s claims of electoral fraud without producing credible evidence. Section 419 of the Constitution allows the military regime to legislate during a state of emergency, but this is not a license to bypass all consultative processes. The UEC, as the designated electoral body, should have been central in drafting or reviewing changes to election legislation. Instead, the regime made sweeping amendments, including enacting a new repressive SAC Law No. 48/2025 titled “Law on the Protection of Multiparty Democratic General Elections from Obstruction, Disruption, and Destruction”. These legislative changes were made in late July 2025, before the UEC’s formal reconstitution in early August. This highlights the UEC’s rubber-stamp role and eliminates a crucial institutional check on electoral integrity.

SAC Law No. 48/2025 criminalises dissent. Section 16 imposes a minimum three-year sentence for any “expression in writing” deemed disruptive. Under this, even a peaceful “no-vote” campaign, online or offline, could become an offence which could lead to a custodial sentence. This deliberate ambiguity ensures that citizens self-censor; this pre-emptively stifles civic dissent. The law also institutionalises surveillance. Chapters 3 and 4 seek to establish central and regional-level committees for election security supervision, unusually extending beyond administrative and law enforcement bodies to include the Ministry of Transport and Communications and Myanmar Post and Telecommunications. The SSPC thus has direct authority to monitor dissent across physical and virtual spaces.

The controversial Cyber Security Law (SAC Law No. 1/2025), which entered into force on 30 July, is more brazen. Purportedly designed to align with the new election laws, this law bans virtual private network (VPN) use and strips privacy safeguards, effectively criminalising access to social media platforms behind firewalls. Though jurisdictional debates continue, the law allegedly applies to Burmese nationals abroad, further restricting speech through legally licensed surveillance beyond the junta’s borders.

Together, the two laws constitute a pincer movement on citizens: Law No. 48/2025 can prosecute people on the content of their message, and Law No. 1/2025 on the means of communications. The lid has tightened on civic agency, as even private “no-vote” opinions risk persecution. The space to resist has virtually vanished.

In contrast to its earlier campaigns, the NUG’s silence in the recent weeks suggests a grim calculation that any organised civic action, even a basic engagement on Facebook, would give the junta grounds to jail its supporters. The junta’s staged election presents an existential bind to the NUG and resistance groups. Remaining silent risks ceding political space to the regime, allowing the junta to claim a new mandate and erode the NUG’s legitimacy linked to the 2020 election results.

Myanmar’s 2025 elections do not present a transition or choice. The State Security and Peace Commission uses laws to silence people and opposition, and challenge ASEAN’s upholding of the importance of compliance. ASEAN can still resist this trap — not sleepwalk into it.

This silence may also serve a proof that NUG is painfully stuck in its self-inflicted trap. It was the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH), which drew its legitimacy from the 2020 election, which had appointed the NUG. By denouncing the 2008 Constitution, the opposition has foreclosed the possibility of organising any parallel or symbolic election before CRPH’s  2020 mandate expires in late 2025. Though admirable in aspiration, its push for an Alternative Federal Transitional Arrangement may be a utopian practice, given the delays in the National Unity Consultative Council process and the NUG’s governance limitations. The NUG thus finds itself trapped between its symbolic reliance on the 2020 mandate and its rejection of the framework that produced it.

In this context, the SSPC’s looming elections might be a deliberate trap. The NUG had previously challenged the SAC on legitimacy, but its activist diplomatic playbook can no longer rely on moral appeals alone. Unless the opposition grounds itself in a more realistic and practical approach in crafting its political narratives, it risks drifting into irrelevance while the junta cloaks itself in electoral theatre and expands its war economy.

The existential bind also extends to ASEAN. Myanmar’s influential neighbours like China and India back the SSPC’s election plans. China has provided diplomatic cover and India has expressed quiet support. Though less significant in the junta’s calculus, ASEAN’s role still matters symbolically and normatively. A tacit recognition of the SSPC’s elections would expose the ASEAN’s failure to uphold its people-centred commitments and damage its credibility as a regional body upholding democratic values in its Charter. ASEAN would also risk being considered complicit in the repression its Five-Point Consensus (5PC) was meant to address. However, ASEAN can still signal the weight of its Myanmar response by slowing down immediate endorsement of the elections, underscoring the need for “free and fair” elections, and explicitly standing with the democratic rights of the Myanmar people. By doing so, the grouping can signal that its commitments are more than empty words.

Myanmar’s 2025 elections do not present a transition or choice. The SSPC uses laws to silence people and opposition, and challenge ASEAN’s upholding of the importance of compliance. ASEAN can still resist this trap — not sleepwalk into it. 

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