Myanmar Junta’s Election Gamble: Facing War on Two Fronts

Kyaw Zan, Opinion

Global Arakan Network December 15, 2025

Women Fighter and Voter in Myanmar (photocrd)

The junta in Naypyidaw wants to stage an election. They call it a roadmap, a return to civilian rule, a way out of the mess they created when they tore up the 2020 results. From where we sit in the hills and along the coast, it looks more like a desperate trick to paint lipstick on a corpse.

Min Aung Hlaing needs a piece of paper that says he is legitimate. He hopes a vote (even one held at gunpoint, with half the country burning) will make foreign ministries hesitate before they slap new sanctions. Beijing and New Delhi will probably clap politely. Moscow will send a telegram. A few authoritarian clubs will toast the “restoration of order.” The West and the UN will scream fraud, as they should. None of that changes the view from here: the same generals who torched villages yesterday will count ballots tomorrow. The result is decided before the first polling station opens.

Some dreamers still whisper that an election, however crooked, could open a crack. Give the regime a new suit, bring in some technocrats, ease the fighting, let investment trickle back. They forget the military never shares power; it only rents it out to loyal servants. After the votes are cooked, the same faces will sit in the same ministries, the same war crimes will continue under a fresh coat of parliamentary paint. The only difference is that foreign ambassadors might start smiling again while the killing goes on.

Protestor in Yangon Crashed Down in 2021 (photocrd)

Reality is harsher. The country is already fractured into a dozen fronts. From the Sagaing hills to the Karen mountains, from Shan plateaus to our own western shores, people have picked up guns because they have no other voice left. The Tatmadaw is stretched thin, bleeding men and money every week. Its grip weakens by the month. When a ruler this weak tries to crown himself through a fake election, he does not gain strength; he invites more enemies.

Political scientists with thick books call it “state fragility during transition.” We have a shorter name: suicide. A military that cannot feed its own soldiers, cannot pay its civil servants, cannot switch on the lights in Yangon, has no spare capacity to manage the storm that follows a stolen vote. The moment the junta declares victory, every group that sat out the fighting will have a new reason to stand up. Students, monks, striking railway workers, doctors, even the old NLD networks that went quiet; all of them will see the fake parliament as proof that peaceful change is dead. Guns will look cleaner than ballots.

So the generals will face fire on two fronts. One is the war they already know: the PDF battalions, the ethnic armies, the young men and women who learned to make mines from YouTube. The second front will open in the cities and towns they still claim to control: protests that turn into roadblocks, strikes that choke supply lines, silent civil servants who stop signing papers. An army built for crushing villages is clumsy against millions who simply refuse to play along.

Min Aung Hlaing thinks an election buys him time. In truth, it sets the timer on his own collapse. The more he rushes to crown himself “elected leader,” the faster the ground crumbles beneath him. Out here, we watch and wait. When the two-front war begins, the regime will learn what every invader before it discovered: this land does not forgive those who try to rule it by force alone.

Let them hold their circus. We will keep sharpening our answer.