Aung San Suu Kyi returns to Myanmar parliament

Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi has returned to parliament after her party’s landslide election victory in legislative elections held last week.

She was mobbed by journalists as she arrived at the parliament on Monday, but declined to make any comment as she takes a low-profile approach to victory.

Aung San Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from top political office but has vowed to rule “above” the next president, whom she will select following her National League for Democracy’s formidable win in the November 8 polls.

The NLD defeated the current army-backed ruling party.

But it will be the legislators from the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party who will continue to dominate parliament as the pre-election legislature returns for a final session that will last until at least the end of January.

Aung San Suu Kyi, a Noble Peace laureate, is banned from becoming president by the junta-era constitution because she married and had children with a foreigner.

She has nevertheless pledged to rule an NLD government through a puppet president, without revealing a candidate or setting out how the arrangement would work.

She has the power to select a president because of her party’s parliamentary majority, with the candidate chosen in a vote of the new NLD-dominated legislature in February.

Observers predict a fevered period of political horse-trading, centred on the uncertainty over the presidency as the country creeps out of the shadow of the military.

Win Htein, a spokesman for the NLD, said that the party was acutely conscious that the size of its victory mirrors its success in 1990 elections, which was ignored by the ruling generals who clung to power for another two decades.

“This time, although we are quite glad that we won, we worry that history may repeat itself. We don’t think the transition will be 100 percent perfect,” he told the AFP news agency.