The Bloodiest Election
Coming Soon…
“I arrived in Australia in 1996 in February with my parents… we always felt that for their children to have a better future is not to live under the dictatorship,” begins Mon Zin, a Myanmar-born pro-democracy activist based in Sydney. In this discussion, she focuses on Myanmar’s planned 2025 election. Her perspective is informed both by personal experience and her present role coordinating international advocacy in support of the democracy movement in resistance to the military coup.
Mon Zin and her family emigrated when she was a teenager, after generations of suffering under military rule. Her father had participated in the 1988 uprising, and her grandfather’s businesses were confiscated during post-coup nationalization under Ne Win, leaving the family with direct experience of how military power reached into private life, property, and security. For her, dictatorship was not an abstract political condition; it was a force that had shaped her family’s prospects, disrupted livelihoods, and pushed them toward exile. So migration, she explains, was not merely economic but existential.
Mon Zin then turns to the 2021 coup. Before that, she says she had been observing the country’s politics from afar, but the coup moved her to become directly engaged in anti-junta activism, describing her main role now as a founding member of the Global Myanmar Spring Revolution. GMSR is a network that coordinates diaspora communities across Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and Canada for the purpose of amplifying the Burmese people’s clear rejection of the junta for an international audience. It directs its advocacy at governments, particularly around sanctions, diplomatic recognition, and the illegitimacy of the junta’s election. She characterizes the organization’s activities as a deliberate effort to keep the revolution’s core message from being diluted into vague calls for “stability” or “dialogue,” and which ignores the power imbalance created by a military that seized the state through violence.
Mon Zin stresses that the Burmese people made their demands quite clear after 2021: they do not want a return to a constrained, military-dominated constitutional order, and they do not want to return to a system in which military power remained permanently embedded in the state. She says that in the decade before the coup, many people had lived through a parallel arrangement in which a civilian government appeared to govern while the military retained veto power and decisive authority. While that period produced openings and a sense of forward motion, she portrays it as a compromise that people accepted for the sake of peace, development, and the possibility of democratic growth. After the coup, that tolerance collapsed, and the demand became total liberation from military rule rather than a negotiated balance with it.
A central part of Mon Zin’s advocacy targets revenue streams that keep the military afloat. She describes alignment with “blood money” campaigning that pressed governments to block foreign revenues, particularly from the oil and gas industry, which she characterizes as a billion-dollar channel sending hard currency into military coffers. She credits diaspora organizing with helping push sanctions forward, and she points to action by the European Union and the United States as meaningful because it constrained money flows and signaled that international actors could, under pressure, treat the junta as not just a normal government.
Mon Zin describes sustained efforts by diaspora groups to prevent the military from replacing Myanmar’s UN representative, U Kyaw Moe Tun, who had been appointed by the elected government before the coup. She argues that control of the seat is central to claims of international legitimacy for anti-junta forces at the United Nations, besides preventing the military from simply claiming the seat as another trophy of conquest.
Against that backdrop, she describes her current focus as an “anti-sham election” campaign. Arguing that the junta’s planned “election” is not designed to be a genuine contest, Mon Zin points out that it is to instead test out if such an election charade can garner international support; she says Min Aung Hlaing ultimately wants to transform in the eyes of the world from a war criminal into a recognized, elected head of state who can claim legal authority, and thus the right to govern by force. To her, this is clearly his attempt to secure what she calls a “license to kill,” allowing the regime to present bombing, repression, and mass violence as legitimate acts of state rather than atrocities and crimes against humanity. With this motivation on the part of the military, Mon Zin believes that the election will be met by increased violence.
Mon Zin reiterates that even before any actual results are announced, it is clear that the election is rigged. She references reporting by the Asian Network for Free Elections that concludes that the election’s mechanisms and regulations are structured to guarantee an outcome favorable to the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). It is a clever kind of rigging, too, she says: rather than relying only on crude ballot-stuffing, the system is designed to look legitimate, while at the same time leveraging votes in a way that advantages the ruling party. She explains that the junta’s election has two layers: local contests, and proportional representation (eg, at the regional or national level). Proportional representation, as the term implies, is normally meant to give parties that do not win local elections some level of government representation if they garner a certain percentage of votes. However, she argues that the way in which the junta’s formula converts local votes into proportional seats will advantage the dominant party by weighting proportional votes towards local election winners, so instead of helping balance proportional representation regardless of who wins elections locally, this will amplify the effect of local winners. Where the military once reserved 25% of seats for itself by design in the 2008 Constitution, the new system positions it to dominate far more—potentially a majority so overwhelming it could claim near-total control.
But if the junta is so unpopular, why can’t opposition parties simply compete in the local elections and reap the benefits of the unbalanced electoral system that the junta designed? Here Mon Zin underscores that the junta’s coercion completes the picture. Major opposition forces have been dissolved, banned, or criminalized, so the junta backed candidates are guaranteed to win. She says that smaller parties that do compete either operate with a hidden “handshake under the table” or risk being delisted if they showed any sign of real opposition or links to resistance forces. Moreover, laws have been passed that criminalize criticizing the election, including threats of long prison sentences for those who publicly call it illegitimate. Mon Zin depicts a climate in which even whispering doubt could bring punishment, and she suggests that fear of repercussions for not voting in cities like Yangon and Mandalay will enable the junta to produce the visual spectacle of a large turnout.
Turning to the mechanics of voting, Mon Zin also describes the electronic voting machines as particularly dangerous because there will be no independent audit of the results, and therefore no transparency. She also explains that the machines may act to collect identity-linked information, and that the lack of oversight creates an open field for manipulation. Diaspora voting is vulnerable as well, because votes cast in advance can be reassigned or counted in ways that serve the regime’s needs.
One bright spot for Mon Zin is that credible observers have refused to participate so as not to lend credibility to this endeavor. She views this as roundly condemning the whole fraudulent election scheme. Instead, the military has had to resort to inviting junta-aligned and other authoritarian states to act as observers, which she derides as an exercise in mutual legitimization. She suggests that when Belarus or Russia endorse the process, it will not add credibility, but rather signal the opposite. She also believes that India is probably involved, not simply to observe but due to its overlapping interests that include border security, arms relationships strategic projects and geopolitical concerns.
Indeed, Mon Zin argues that Myanmar’s crisis is not merely an internal issue. The flow of refugees, transnational crime, drugs, and armed conflict act as regionally destabilizing forces that she believes will intensify if the election proceeds on schedule, and the junta gains a veneer of legitimacy. She describes ASEAN—the regional organization that could have the most influence on restraining the Myanmar military—as structurally constrained, with some members openly supportive of the junta and others cautious but unable to act decisively in fear of contradicting China’s preferences, given the outsized role that China has in shaping much of ASEAN’s decisions. She adds that fortunately, Australia has already come out in denouncing the sham elections, and additionally has sanctioned Min Aung Hlaing and downgraded diplomatic engagement with the junta, while continuing its ongoing humanitarian assistance.
Looking past the election, Mon Zin predicts rapid recognition by a cluster of authoritarian or strategically aligned states, followed by pressure on ASEAN members to follow suit. This, she believes, will result in increased armed conflict, with the resistance refusing to put down weapons simply because the junta staged a vote. She expects more airstrikes, more displacement, and more suffering, which in turn will spark deepening sanctions, with reputable businesses continuing to avoid Myanmar because the risks—currency distortions, remittance cuts, instability, and reputational damage—remain too severe. Under military rule, she says, people connected to the regime became richer while average people’s lives become even worse.
Her closing message is directed at people outside the country who feel hopeless or powerless. She argues that refusing to legitimize the process matters as a statement of solidarity with people inside Myanmar, especially those in the Civil Disobedience Movement who gave up their jobs, status, and safety. She urges diaspora communities to support the resistance materially where they can, to keep speaking about Myanmar, and to sustain global solidarity across democratic struggles. At the same time, she warns that resistance movements have to hold themselves accountable and confront their internal failures openly, because opposing dictatorship is not enough if a new authoritarian structure simply replaces the old.
But in the end, in spite of it all, Mon Zin ultimately remains optimistic. “We are on the right side of the history!” she exclaims.