Turnout: 54.22%
About this election
Myanmar's military junta staged a general election in phases between late December 2025 and late January 2026, the page's date of 11 January 2026 falling in the middle phase. It was the first national vote since the 2020 election, whose result the army annulled when it seized power in the February 2021 coup. The military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won the most seats — 231 of the 264 reported here — with the remainder split among ethnic and other pro-establishment parties. Reported turnout was 54.22%. The exercise was widely condemned abroad as an attempt to put a civilian veneer on continued military rule.
In February 2021 the armed forces overthrew the elected government of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which had won a landslide in 2020, detaining its leader Aung San Suu Kyi and ending a decade of partial civilian rule. The coup triggered a nationwide uprising and a full-scale civil war between the junta, pro-democracy resistance forces and ethnic armed organisations. By the time of the election the military controlled less than half of the country's territory, and the NLD had been dissolved while Aung San Suu Kyi remained imprisoned.
Because so much of the country lay outside the junta's control or was an active conflict zone, the election could not be held on a single day across the whole nation. It was conducted in successive phases covering only those townships the military deemed secure: the first phase reportedly covered around a third of Myanmar's townships. Vast areas, and the people living in them, were simply excluded — amounting to mass disenfranchisement.
Before the vote the junta altered the electoral framework, moving away from the first-past-the-post system used in 2015 and 2020 toward a form of proportional representation — a change critics said was designed to prevent another sweeping NLD-style victory and to fragment the result in the military's favour. Elections were held for the national legislature (the Pyithu Hluttaw and Amyotha Hluttaw), under conditions set entirely by the ruling State Administration Council.
With the NLD dissolved and most genuine opposition parties banned or unable to operate, the field was dominated by the USDP, the party founded by former generals, alongside a number of smaller ethnic parties — among them Shan, Pa-O, Mon and Naga formations — and other groups willing to participate within the junta's framework. No party capable of challenging military control was permitted to contest.
The opposition National Unity Government, formed by ousted lawmakers, and many ethnic armed organisations rejected the election outright and in some areas sought to disrupt it. Tens of thousands of political prisoners remained in detention, and there was no meaningful freedom of assembly, speech or press. Voting took place amid ongoing fighting, and the resistance treated the poll as illegitimate.
The election drew sharp international criticism. The United Kingdom, the European Parliament and United Nations officials denounced it as a sham that was neither free nor fair, pointing to the banning of opposition parties, the imprisonment of political figures, the ongoing war and the exclusion of much of the population. Few governments recognised the vote as a legitimate expression of the popular will.
The election fed directly into the consolidation of military authority: an indirect presidential election held in April 2026 confirmed the junta chief, Min Aung Hlaing, who had led the country since the coup, in the presidency. The vote thus served less to transfer power than to repackage continued military rule in constitutional form.
The contrast with 2020 was stark: then the NLD had won a commanding majority in a contest widely regarded as credible, only for the military to reject the outcome and seize power. The USDP had also lost heavily in 2015. The 2026 result reversed those verdicts not through a change in public opinion but by removing the NLD from the ballot altogether and holding the vote on the junta's terms.
The election took place in the middle of a war the junta has not won. Since the 2021 coup, a broad resistance — the parallel National Unity Government, locally organised People's Defence Forces, and long-established ethnic armed organisations — has wrested control of large swathes of the country from the military. The conflict has displaced millions and caused widespread civilian suffering. Far from resolving that struggle, the staged election was rejected by the resistance as an attempt to legitimise the very rule they are fighting to overturn.
Rather than a step toward democratic transition, the vote is best understood as part of the junta's strategy to convert military power into a constitutional form it can present to the world and to sympathetic governments. By producing a compliant legislature and confirming Min Aung Hlaing in the presidency, the process entrenched the post-coup order while leaving the underlying conflict, and the question of Myanmar's political future, entirely unresolved.
Union Election Commission of Myanmar (military-appointed). Figures cannot be independently verified.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.