Campaigning has begun in military-run Myanmar, two months ahead of an election being widely dismissed at home and abroad as a transparent bid to confer legitimacy on the army’s 2021 seizure of power.

The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) held events on Tuesday in the capital Naypyitaw and in Yangon, the country’s largest city, to launch its campaign.

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Voting is set to begin on December 28 in an election that rights groups like Human Rights Watch have dismissed as a “sham” and that the European Commission has ruled out sending observers to, saying it will be neither free nor fair.

Opposition parties disbanded

Myanmar’s ruling government has touted elections as a path to reconciliation in a country riven by civil war since it grabbed power in a 2021 coup, deposing and jailing Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy (NLD) won the last two elections by landslides.

But voting will not be held in one in seven national parliament constituencies, many of them active war zones, while dozens of opposition parties, including the NLD, will not be participating, after the army-appointed Union Election Commission ordered them to be disbanded.

Meanwhile, a number of opposition organisations, including armed resistance groups, have said they will try to derail the elections, calling for boycotts.

The campaign began a day after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the election could cause further instability in Myanmar, while diplomatic sources said the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) would not send observers, in what would be a further blow to the military government’s push for international legitimacy.

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Fifty-seven parties have registered to run in the election, but in the absence of the NLD or any credible national opposition, the USDP is expected to win the most seats.

Election ‘means nothing’

As small crowds turned out for USDP campaign events in the capital and Yangon, others expressed their disinterest in the election.

“This election means nothing to me,” a 60-year-old man in Sittwe, Rakhine state, told the AFP news agency. “It is not a genuine election, and I see no one supporting it.”

Another man, displaced by fighting to Mandalay, told the agency he was unlikely to vote. “We are not very interested,” he said. “We just want to go home.”