4 - Myanmar's Parliament: From Scorn to Significance

Summary

Like much about Myanmar's transition to discipline-flourishing democracy— as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC, 1997–2011) so regularly called it—the hluttaw (parliament) established under the 2008 Constitution was widely written off before it even came into being. The conventional wisdom among commentators, analysts, and politicians was that the constitution was designed to perpetuate decades of military rule, the 2010 general election would be a sham, and the hluttaw would be a rubber stamp for the new military-backed national government. The one-sided result of that general election, the rules of which heavily favoured the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), only served to reinforce this view.

Despite the strong majority enjoyed by the USDP, and the presence of appointed military representatives, who fill 25 percent of all seats in each national, state, and region parliament, over the past two-and-a-half years the hluttaw bodies have been anything but a rubber stamp. On the contrary: one of the defining features of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, or National Parliament, has been the regular tension, and even conflict, with President U Thein Sein's government and other institutions in Myanmar's political landscape, including the judiciary, political parties, media, and civil society. The parliament has vigorously asserted its independence from these other institutions—to the point of potentially harming the reform process—and its members have taken particularly seriously the task of acting as a check on the Union government, cutting budgets and discussing and investigating reports of corruption and illegal land confiscations. As writer and historian Thant Myint-U has noted, because it is a new institution the parliament does not suffer in the same way as the judiciary and bureaucracy from corruption, red tape, and other legacies of decades of military rule (Kean 2012). For the same reason, however, the hluttaw and its members are still feeling their way around a system bequeathed by the SPDC through its tight management of the constitution-drafting process. Inevitably, this has led to some missteps and misunderstandings.

Given Myanmar's fraught political history and the binary nature of post-1988 politics, particularly in areas dominated by ethnic Burmese, a surprising degree of cooperation between its representatives has characterized the parliamentary system at the national level. Even after the addition of representatives from the National League for Democracy (NLD) in May 2012 there has been a consistent and notable lack of adherence to party political lines.