There is two reasoning why the ethnic parties lost in the last nationwide elections.

One is the so-called tactical vote, where all non-Bamar ethnic groups, fed up with the military’s suppression and military occupation of their homeland, decided to vote for the Aung San Suu Kyi-led NLD to usher in the “regime change”. For they knew every vote counts, to get rid of the hated military and its regime, the USDP.

The second one is the election, played out on an imbalanced political playing field. Suu Kyi was and is a world class political figure, aside from being an democracy icon, who is closely identified with the NLD. Thus the elections held in ethnic areas were like a fight between a light weight and a heavy weight boxers, or if you like, a fight between Goliath and David.

Not surprisingly, except only in Shan and Arakan States, the NLD won with a big margin.

While the tactical voting is necessary to give the NLD the majority it needed, it is not aimed to be a blank check that the NLD or Suu Kyi should take it for granted. In other words, ethnic states politics should be left to the ethnic parties to sort out the representative question among themselves, and not muddying it in the name of rallying under a “national party” banner, that has the nature of cross-cutting across the ethnic lines. For NLD is a Bamar party in every sense of the words and not a union party that it wants itself to be seen or portrayed. Of course, the time will come, when such political configuration will become a reality, like in a lot of matured democratic countries, but not now.

But this is not to say, the ethnic tactical voting during the last election was wrong, but in fact, it is a brilliant move. The only problem now is for the NLD to accept and draw back now from the forthcoming future elections and abstain from entering the fray in ethnic states, and instead, energize the ethnic parties that have the identical ideology as coalition partners, concentrating only in the 7 Divisions or Regions, where the majority of the Bamar resides.

Of course, whether the NLD and Suu Kyi could brush out their latent ethnocentrism, camouflaged by the national party facade, and follow the said suggestion is another question.

The point here is just to give some theoretical thinking, why the ethnic parties had performed so badly in the last elections.