It took more than a year of embittered parliamentary debate, large amounts of the legislature’s time and energy, and further strained State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s relationship with the military.
Yet when the National League for Democracy’s attempt to change Myanmar’s constitution drew to a close in March, they had almost nothing to show for it; just four relatively minor changes to the charter’s wording.
Now they have even less. On Thursday, parliament decided that it would be too costly to go ahead with the nationwide referendum required to approve two of the changes, and postponed the vote indefinitely.
The national vote was needed to update language used to refer to the elderly and people with disabilities in sections 32a and 32b. But the Union Election Commission (UEC) estimated a referendum would have cost around 10bn kyat, roughly $7.1m.
Than Aung of the UEC argued in parliament Thursday that the two articles were of marginal significance to the government’s ventures.
He proposed saving the money for a future referendum when there are other constitutional amendments to approve at the same time.
Aung San Suu Kyi promised in her 2015 election campaign that she would try to wrest power from the military by changing the charter. But the bid was doomed to fail because unelected soldiers in parliament can veto any changes even though her party commands a supermajority.
Under the previous government, parliament voted to amend the charter to change the word “military” to “defense” in a section detailing the qualifications of the President. That change was also subject to a referendum that never went ahead.
The other two changes in March this year were tweaks to sections 261a and 344 to remove unnecessary words, and do not require a referendum.
