Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday called her party's landslide victory in weekend by-elections a "triumph of the people" and said she hoped they represented a new dawn. "We hope this will be the beginning of a new era of involvement by the people in the politics of this country," Suu Kyi told a crowd of well-wishers who had gathered outside the Yangon headquarters of her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). The NLD said that according to the vote counts so far, it had won 43 of the 45 seats contested in Sunday's by-elections in formerly military-run Myanmar. The party ran candidates in 44 races, and it was likely it would win all 44 once the final tallies were made, NLD deputy leader Kyi Toe was quoted as saying by DPA. The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who had been detained for 15 years by the former ruling military junta, won an estimated 90 per cent of the votes cast in her Kawhmu constituency, 30 kilometres south of Yangon, according to the NLD. The result would assure her a seat in the lower house of parliament, where she is likely to become opposition leader. Official results were expected in a few days, but the NLD released the party's results from its Yangon headquarters as the vote counting was taking place publicly and in the presence of the participating parties. It was the first election Suu Kyi contested. She was under house arrest during Myanmar's past two general elections in 1990 and 2010. In the 1990 vote, the NLD won by a landslide but was denied power for two decades by the junta.
