MANDALAY, Myanmar (AFP) —  Myanmar opened the final round of its month-long election on Sunday, with the dominant pro-military party on course for a landslide in a junta-run vote critics say will prolong the army’s grip on power.

The Southeast Asian nation has a long history of military rule, but the generals took a back seat for a decade of civilian-led reforms.

That ended in a 2021 military coup when democratic figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi was detained, civil war broke out, and the country descended into humanitarian crisis.

The election’s third and final phase opened in dozens of constituencies across the country at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, just a week shy of the coup’s five-year anniversary.

The military pledges the election will return power to the people but with Suu Kyi sidelined and her hugely popular party dissolved, democracy advocates say the ballot is stacked with military allies.

Junta chief Min Aung Hlaing — who has not ruled out serving as president after the poll — toured voting stations in Mandalay, wearing civilian dress.

“This is the path chosen by the people,” he told reporters in response to a question from Agence France-Presse. “I am also a part of the people, and I support this.”

“The people from Myanmar can support whoever they want to support,” he said.

Voting is not being held in rebel-held parts of the country, and in junta-controlled areas rights monitors say the run-up has been characterized by coercion and the crushing of dissent.

Teacher Zaw Ko Ko Myint cast his vote at a Mandalay high school around dawn.

“Although I do not expect much, we want to see a better country,” the 53-year-old told AFP. “I feel relieved after voting, as if I fulfilled my duty.”

‘Fabricated vote’

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) — packed with retired officers and described by analysts as a military puppet — won more than 85 percent of elected lower house seats and two-thirds of those in the upper house in the poll’s first two phases.

“The junta has orchestrated the election specifically to ensure a landslide by its political proxy,” United Nations rights expert Tom Andrews said in a statement Friday.

“States that endorse the results of these polls will be complicit in the junta’s attempt to legitimize military rule through a fabricated vote.”

Official results are expected late this week, but the USDP could claim victory in the hours after polling closes.

A military-drafted constitution also gives the armed forces a quarter of the seats in both houses of parliament, which will vote as a whole to pick the president.

“I don’t expect anything from this election,” a 34-year-old Yangon resident told AFP earlier, requesting anonymity for security reasons. “Things will just keep dragging on.”

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party thrashed the USDP in the last elections in 2020, before the military seized power on 1 February 2021, making unfounded allegations of widespread vote-rigging.

The 80-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate remains detained incommunicado at an unknown location on charges rights monitors dismiss as politically motivated.