A militocracy is a system of government that claims to be democratic and holds elections, but the majority of positions in all branches of government are held by serving or former military officers, intelligence officers and other security forces.
The military junta in Myanmar is using the local and national elections that begin on 28 December 2025 as the first stage of creating a militocracy. Out of 4,900 election candidates over 1,000 are serving military officers and the rest are either former military officers, business cronies or have passed military inspection by registering within the strict rules set by the junta.
Following the completion of these carefully engineered elections in February or March 2026, the junta will claim that Myanmar is a democratic civilian government. By then military control will be exercised through the thousands of positions in all branches of government held by serving and former military officers.
Several foreign governments will be quick to accept the election results because Myanmar’s militocracy guarantees access to strategic ports and rare earth minerals.
Even institutionally democratic governments are listening to their racist experts who say that Burma (Myanmar) can never be a democracy, and so pragmatism requires that they accept the new militocracy.
It is experts such as these in the EU business unit in Yangon and Bangkok who justified continued European investment under the military junta. They explained to us that U Zaw Zaw – a military crony identified by the UN as committing crimes against humanity – was “one of the good guys”. Imagine an EU technocrat describing a business crony of Putin as one of the good guys. This blatant double standard only happens if the basic assumption is that the lives of people in Myanmar are somehow worth less than Europeans.
Any decision by any government to accept the sham elections and the subsequent militocracy, is nothing less than a blatant declaration that the peoples of Myanmar (peoples – plural) are undeserving of the universal human rights that democratic governments and the UN system are supposed to uphold.
See The military coup in Myanmar is business as usual for Accor [3 Feb 2021] and Financing the coup: foreign companies that continued doing business with the military and its cronies financed this assault on freedom in Myanmar [10 Feb 2021].
