YANGON – Voting was underway in Myanmar’s elections on Sunday, with the party of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi heavily favored to retain power it had wrestled from the powerful military five years ago.
More than 90 parties are competing for seats in the lower and upper houses of Parliament, while there are also elections at the state and regional levels.With the opposition in disarray, Suu Kyi remains Myanmar’s most popular politician.
But her government has fallen short of expectations, with economic growth doing little to alleviate widespread poverty and a failure to ease tensions among the country’s fractious ethnic groups.There are more than 37 million people eligible to vote, including 5 million first-timers.