In a meeting with junta staff and community representatives in Meiktila, Mandalay Region on 15th June 2024, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing announced that the "general election" will be held in 2025.
He also said that before the electoral exercise in 2025, plans to hold a population census in October 2024 are under preparation.
The junta-appointed Union Election Commission (UEC) has been organizing the demonstration of the use of Myanmar Electronic Voting Machine (MEVM) in regions such as Yangon, Mandalay, Ayeyarwaddy, and Bago.
Back in an interview held in March, Min Aung Hlaing had already indicated that the junta-proposed "election" may not be nationwide and could be regional or sectional instead.
Our analysis clearly showed that the sham electoral exercise is being engineered by the junta-appointed UEC to marginalize and abolish political parties that won overwhelming majorities in previous 2015 and 2020 election, while approving pro-junta political parties that won only a small fraction of seats in the past elections. The electoral exercise engineered by the junta lacks fairness and legitimacy, and this new development demands a timely response from the international community to reject the sham election in a unified manner.