Agencies

The coup d’état staged by military in Myanmar that prevented Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected party from taking power yesterday baffled many political analysts.

The coup returns the country to full military rule after a short experiment in quasi-democracy that began in 2011, when the military, which had been in power since 1962, implemented parliamentary elections and other reforms.

For the past five years, Suu Kyi and her once-banned National League for Democracy (NLD) party led the country after being elected in 2015 in the freest and fairest vote seen in 25 years. Yesterday morning, the party should have begun its second term in office after winning 83 percent of available seats in the 2020 election.

But behind the scenes, the military has kept a relatively tight grip on Myanmar, thanks to a constitution which guarantees it a quarter of all seats in parliament and control of the country’s most powerful ministries.