Myanmar Votes in Rare Openly Contested General Election

Polling stations opened early Sunday in Myanmar’s general election, which will be a rare openly contested poll in a country where ministry posts are traditionally held by the military, media report.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Historic voting opened at 6 a.m. local time (23:30GMT). About 30 million people are eligible to vote, according to BBC.

More than 90 political parties and 6,000 candidates are vying for seats in the 664-seat parliament, although 25 percent of mandates are reserved for the military, the UK outlet reports.

The frontrunner is the military-backed Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP), which has been in power since the formal end of Myanmar’s junta rule in 2010. Its main rival is the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi is barred from running for presidency by a constitutional provision that disqualifies candidates with foreign family members. Both her son and late husband are British nationals.

Myanmar, a Southeast Asian nation known formerly as Burma, has been controlled by the military since the 1962 coup. The junta formally gave up power in 2011, but most of the country’s party leaders are former military officers.