FEBRUARY 4 — Myanmar’s so-called election that began on December 8, 2025, is not a political event worth celebrating. It is not even one worth debating at length.

Excessive attention risks legitimising what is, at best, an exercise in managed optics and, at worst, a calculated insult to democratic intelligence.

This was not an election designed to restore legitimacy. It was designed to manufacture distraction.

Myanmar today is better understood as a basket case than as a polity in transition.

Institutions are broken, authority is contested by force, and governance has collapsed into coercion. Against this backdrop, an election is not a signal of recovery. It is political theatre staged amid national ruin.

The fundamental problem is not that the election was flawed. Many elections are. The problem is that it was structurally meaningless. No credible opposition participation. No free media. 

No independent electoral authority. No protection of basic civil liberties.

An election without choice is not an election. It is choreography.

Under Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar has hardened into a survivalist military enclave. 

The regime governs not through consent but through repression. Ballots are deployed not to reflect public will, but to signal endurance by force.

The December 2025 exercise fits this pattern perfectly. It was meant to project order without delivering governance, and normalcy without legitimacy. It was a move to buy time, fragment external pressure, and exhaust international attention.

To treat this episode as a political milestone would be analytically careless.

Myanmar’s deeper crisis lies elsewhere. The economy is fractured and shrinking. 

Public services barely function. Education and healthcare systems are in disarray. 

Large swathes of the population survive outside any formal state structure.

The country no longer operates as a coherent administrative unit. 

It operates as a patchwork of coercive zones, resistance areas, and informal survival economies.

From a regional standpoint, Myanmar has become a liability rather than a partner. 

Instability spills across borders through refugees, trafficking, narcotics, and arms flows. 

These are not hypothetical risks. They are daily realities for neighbouring states.

This is why the impulse to “engage the election” is misguided.

Engagement presumes a counterpart capable of reform and compromise. Myanmar’s military leadership has demonstrated neither. 

It has shown only consistency in one domain: the use of violence to substitute for legitimacy.

There is a difference between engagement and validation. The December 2025 election deserves neither validation nor amplification.

Strategic neglect, therefore, becomes a defensible option. Not abandonment. Not indifference. But calibrated distance.

Not every political process deserves recognition. Not every ballot box deserves endorsement.

Some spectacles are designed precisely to exploit international fatigue and procedural obsession.

Myanmar’s election falls squarely into this category.

This does not mean ignoring Myanmar’s people. On the contrary, humanitarian access must be expanded.

Cross-border aid should be protected and depoliticised. Refugees and displaced communities deserve sustained support.

What should be denied is political oxygen to a regime that confuses procedure with progress.

Within Asean, this distinction matters deeply. Lowering standards in the name of inclusivity only corrodes Asean’s credibility further. 

The Five-Point Consensus has already been stretched thin by non-compliance and bad faith.

To now treat a staged election as a breakthrough would hollow out Asean’s remaining moral authority.

There is also a broader danger.

Over-publicising Myanmar’s electoral charade risks normalising a global trend in which elections stripped of freedom are still treated as sufficient for recognition. 

That precedent will not stop at Myanmar.

Authoritarian regimes elsewhere are watching closely.

History will not remember December 8, 2025, as a turning point. If it is remembered at all, it will be recalled as another episode in a prolonged implosion — where form was preserved but substance had long vanished.

Myanmar’s tragedy is not electoral failure. It is state failure.

Yet there is an important caveat.

Neglect must never harden into sheer isolationism.

Total isolation closes channels, empowers hardliners, and reduces access to populations in need. 

It also removes whatever limited leverage remains for managing an eventual political opening—however distant that may be. 

What is required instead is stealth diplomacy.

Quiet engagement. Back-channel communication. Humanitarian corridors negotiated without publicity. 

Technical coordination carried out below the political radar.

These are not glamorous tools, but they are often the only ones that work in deeply fractured environments.

Stealth diplomacy allows space for complexity. 

It avoids rewarding political theatre while preserving access for future solutions.

Myanmar does not need applause. It does not need headlines. It does not need recognition for an election devoid of meaning.

It needs pressure without performance, engagement without endorsement, and diplomacy without illusion.

Sometimes, the most responsible response is not to spotlight failure — but to manage it carefully, quietly, and with long-term realism.

* Phar Kim Beng is a professor of Asean Studies at the Institute of International and Asean Studies, International Islamic University of Malaysia. 

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.