Old Generals, New Clothes: The Myanmar Junta’s Illegitimate 2025-26 Elections and the Way Forward
In February 2021, the Myanmar military, resorting to its decades-old playbook, launched a coup d’état. Built on the baseless claim that the November 2020 general elections – which delivered the National League for Democracy (NLD) a landslide victory – had been fraudulent, it sought to upend the country’s nascent democracy and restore military rule.
Engineered by alleged war criminal and former armed forces Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, the power grab unleashed a polycrisis of atrocity crimes, political imprisonment, forced displacement, dire humanitarian need, and economic instability that continues to damage and divide the entire region. The coup attempt was met with widespread opposition across the country and, five years on, continues to be broadly rejected.
In December 2025 and January 2026, facing countrywide resistance from the pro- democracy Spring Revolution movement and in desperate need of international legitimacy, the junta finally staged its own elections, which it had been planning for years.
Those elections are the focus of this paper, which is co-authored by the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) and the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), with election expert Amaël Vier as lead writer.
ANFREL is the leading regional network working to advance democratic elections in Asia, comprising 26 member organisations in 18 countries. SAC-M is an independent group of international experts working to support the people of Myanmar in their fight for human rights, peace, democracy, justice, and accountability.
The paper opens by examining in Chapter 1 the Myanmar military’s years-long strategy to contest and eventually erase historical evidence of the 2020 elections and the overwhelming democratic mandate delivered to the NLD. In its place, the junta perpetuated an alternative narrative, according to which only it and its own staged elections could deliver a way out of the current political crisis. This crisis, of course, was of the junta’s own making.
Chapters 2 and 3 scrutinise the junta-staged elections, which took place over three phases in December 2025 and January 2026, and show how they failed across the board to meet internationally recognised standards for genuine elections. The junta’s elections were held in only 42% of Myanmar’s territory, under a restrictive legal framework that barred legitimate political competition to the advantage and benefit of the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). Every aspect of the staged elections, from its election management body to the design of the electoral system and the selection of political parties, was carefully engineered to ensure a predetermined outcome. The junta not only set the rules of the game, but also chose the players and the referee.
Chapter 4 explores the atrocities, widespread violence, and assaults on fundamental freedoms that the junta has employed since its coup attempt to terrorise and punish perceived opponents. These deliberate and systematic attacks against civilians also sought to soften and reclaim lost ground ahead of the junta’s illegitimate elections.
Chapter 5 discusses the fraudulent new “parliament” that has been constituted in Naypyitaw and what will likely come next now that Min Aung Hlaing’s electoral charade has concluded. The junta’s rebranding of itself as a civilian “government” is entirely superficial. At its head remains Min Aung Hlaing, whose relentless pursuit of the presidency has inflicted an incalculable toll on the country.
Finally, but of utmost importance, Chapter 6 explores the Spring Revolution movement which, while still in its foundational stages, represents the only legitimate and viable path toward a stable and inclusive federal democratic Union. Across this movement, there is meaningful consensus around a shared vision for a new constitution that enshrines civilian governance, equality, self-determination, and justice.
The Myanmar people have chosen and are actively forging a new democratic path, as their widespread rejection of the junta’s illegitimate elections resoundingly demonstrated. For years, they have resisted the most brutal military in the region, whilst undertaking the immense challenge of building the foundations of Myanmar’s federal democratic future. The grave risk now is that through expediency, apathy, or both, countries will normalise their relationships with the junta and will give it the legitimacy it so desperately needs.
Drawing on views expressed from within Myanmar’s revolutionary movement, the paper concludes by setting out actionable recommendations that the international community – including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), states, and United Nations organs and entities – must take to support Myanmar’s pro-democracy actors.
Among other actions, the international community must reaffirm its political, financial, material, capacity-building, and humanitarian support for legitimate pro-democracy actors and emerging federal democratic institutions, including the newly launched Steering Council for the Emergence of a Federal Democratic Union (SCEF), ethnic organisations and councils, the National Unity Government (NUG), emerging state units and alliances, civil society, and minority communities. These actors are striving to build a genuine, inclusive, and sustainable new federal democratic Union, and to finally drive the military out of Myanmar politics for good.
At the same time, the international community must isolate the junta and stop its atrocity crimes, including by blocking its access to cash, munitions, jet fuel, dual-use items, and surveillance technology. States must also outright reject the outcome of the junta’s fraudulent elections and refrain from engaging in any act that may confer legitimacy on the junta and its illegitimate “government”.
Finally, the international community must also hold Min Aung Hlaing and other senior junta members to account and finally end the decades of military impunity that have enabled repeated cycles of violence and political upheaval without consequence.
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19 May 2026
