Democracy campaigner hopes for new era in Burma following election victory

After the results were confirmed by election officials she said she hoped it would mark the start of a new era for the long-repressed country.

Ms Suu Kyi spoke to thousands of cheering supporters who gathered outside her party’s headquarters a day after the closely watched poll.

“The success we are having is the success of the people,” she said, as the sea of supporters chanted her name and flashed V for victory signs.

The state Election Commission confirmed that her National League for Democracy (NLD) had swept to a victory that will put it at the head of a small opposition bloc in the military-dominated parliament.

State radio and television broadcast the commission’s announcement that the NLD had won 40 of the 45 seats at stake. Results from five constituencies in remote areas have not been declared.

“It is not so much our triumph as a triumph of the people who have decided that they have to be involved in the political process in this country,” Ms Suu Kyi said. “We hope this will be the beginning of a new era.”

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate will take public office for the first time and lead the NLD in parliament, where it will hold just about six per cent of the seats.

The victory, however, marks a major milestone in the south-east Asian nation, which is emerging from a ruthless era of military rule, and is an astonishing reversal of fortune for a woman who became one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience.

The former military junta had kept Ms Suu Kyi imprisoned in her home for the better part of two decades. When she was finally released in late 2010, just after a general election which many deemed neither free nor fair, few could have imagined she would so quickly make the leap from democracy advocate to elected official – a victory her supporters hope will open the way for a potential presidential run in 2015.