YANGON -- Myanmar's parliamentary elections, scheduled for the fall of 2015, will be one of the most closely watched in Asia in 2015. The biggest question is whether opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who for decades has been the symbol of struggle for freedom in Myanmar, will be allowed to run for president.
"I have been demanding to hold the four-party talks on constitutional reform since one year ago," Suu Kyi recently told top members of the opposition National League for Democracy, or NLD, which she leads. The four-party talks she wants would involve her, President Thein Sein, parliamentary speaker Thura Shwe Mann and Min Aung Hlaing, commander in chief of the military. Talks would center on an amendment to the 2008 constitution that bars anyone with a spouse or a child who is the citizen of a foreign country from being elected president or vice president by the parliament. Suu Kyi's late husband and her sons are British.
