Myanmar’s phased elections have given the junta a thin veneer of legitimacy, but they have done nothing to halt economic decline, armed conflict or the steady erosion of hope. With little external pressure and no genuine reform, fragmentation is likely to deepen.

Economic development is uneven and weak, accelerating the loss of human capital through displacement and emigration. It is unlikely that external actors – ASEAN or the United States – can bring about change. The year 2026 will likely see the tendency for fragmentation persist under the cover of an electoral process but without genuine reform.

With the third phase of Myanmar’s multi-stage election that finished on 25 January, its military junta wants a positive start to 2026. The junta’s goals over the coming months are to reassure fellow authoritarians that they are worth further investment and persuade the rest of us that a strictly managed veneer of electoral performance is sufficient for some reputational rehabilitation.

The extent to which this goal is achievable is  only partly in the junta’s control. Armed rebellions on almost all fronts remain vibrant. Popular discontent with the regime is still high. The only industries that are booming – drugs,  scams,  nightlife,  smuggling and  extortion – are never the basis for sustainable development. Recovery from the devastating March 2025 earthquake has been slow and uneven.

Poverty, inequality, despair and limited possibilities are the  shared inheritance of the post-coup generation of  young people in Myanmar.  Attacks and airstrikes on civilians continue. Those who have a chance are still getting out, partly to avoid conscription into any of the armed forces and partly because the prospects, from here to the far horizon,  remain grim.

With researcher access to Myanmar at a new low ebb, if you want to get a sense of how much  Myanmar talent has fled the maelstrom, then spending some time around Peninsula Plaza in Singapore on a Sunday is a good place to start. The nearby City Hall underground station is deluged by people from Myanmar – maintaining social connections, speaking their mother tongues, swapping ideas about the past, present and future.

In Singapore, the large Myanmar diaspora is mostly pushed to the margins. Many newcomers are employed as maids and carers. Some find work as nurses or in the construction, shipping or fishing industries. Particularly since the coup, there are also many students and some flows of businesspeople, and other professionals like engineers and doctors.

Their exile is a reminder that ASEAN’s  five-point consensus has never needed to be taken too seriously by the junta. Myanmar’s mainland Southeast Asian neighbours with greater sympathy for dictatorial rule – especially Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and to some extent Thailand – are the most comfortable with any facade of progress.

Under these conditions, there will be matter-of-fact calls from some Asian capitals to simply accept Myanmar’s post-election reality.

To get her own perspective, the Philippines Foreign Secretary, Theresa Lazaro, met in January, as one of her country’s first acts as chair of ASEAN for this year, with the junta’s Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Tensions within ASEAN, as shown in the regime’s recent  warning to Timor-Leste’s representative in Myanmar, are also inevitable.

The other reality, almost five years after the coup, is that Myanmar’s former de facto leader  Aung San Suu Kyi and many other elected leaders are still locked up – an inconvenient fact for anybody wanting to spruik a new quasi-democratic renaissance. She and others will probably be released, eventually, but they will then be strictly controlled, with no near-term prospect of revitalising their political fortunes.

The United States, where Myanmar has always been a  niche issue, only enlivened by Aung San Suu Kyi’s now-faded charisma, is focused on other things, including its ambitions in Venezuela and Greenland. The  US announcement in November denying temporary protected status to thousands of people displaced by Myanmar’s conflicts further indicates how little serious attention the US administration gives these issues.

The generals in Naypyidaw have therefore charted a safer path, ensuring that they receive a boost from ties to  China and Russia without becoming a fresh nexus of proxy conflict. China’s concerted but inconsistent authoritarian  statecraft is not leaving things to chance in Myanmar, ensuring that it secures its primary interests which include access to the Indian Ocean.

But the erratic  international engagement of President Donald Trump means that wild changes are still possible. For instance, Myanmar could become a further site for Trump’s  foreign policy and peacebuilding adventures. The characteristic starting point would be a big bang ‘peace deal’.

That scenario is far from the most likely. For 2026, a grinding post-election impasse, more trauma and war, and the further erosion of hope are the obvious base case. It is telling that Myanmar’s civil wars dating back to the 1940s have plenty of fuel left, with  balkanisation now a persistent trend.

Still, the White House’s unpredictable policy gaze, its quest for prizes and distractions, and the chance to score  a win over China’s back fence, are each compelling enough reasons to keep some fresh intervention within the realm of possibility.

The  phased election over the Christmas and New Year period, which started on 28 December 2025, was timed, in this context, to avoid proper global scrutiny. But the election still generated a brief bump in international media attention, which has led into sobering coverage of the fifth anniversary of the 1 February 2021 coup.

Yet even as the coup-makers’ damage is  again  tallied-up, the consolidation of a longer-term form of civilianised military rule is the main agenda for the generals. Such an outcome will not necessarily draw US ire or too much dismay from other traditional junta critics. In the muddle of 2020s geopolitics, all sorts of  previously unlikely configurations and coalitions are on show.

The best hope is that – while there is no obvious road to prosperity, peace or democracy for Myanmar from here – the unpredictability of global forces right now helps to encourage some workable compromises that give people across Myanmar’s towns and villages a new chance to renew and rebuild on their own terms.

Republished from East Asia Forum, 3 February 2026