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ASEAN’s responses to major regional security challenges like the Myanmar crisis illustrate weakening ASEAN centrality — ASEAN’s key principle and aspiration. The question of whether and how ASEAN can assert its centrality in the future hinges on its approach to Myanmar’s junta-organised elections, held in December 2025 and January 2026.
Article 41.3 of the ASEAN Charter states that ASEAN should uphold its centrality in regional cooperation and community building. The article centres on substantive centrality, meaning ASEAN’s ability to uphold its primacy regarding the outcomes of key regional security challenges.
In the eyes of both domestic and international communities, Myanmar’s junta-administered elections are a sham. The run-up to the elections has been characterised by the imprisonment of key political figures, such as Aung San Suu Kyi and former president Win Myint, and the exclusion of main opposition parties including the National League for Democracy, the former ruling party led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
The junta has also marginalised voters in conflict-affected areas — mainly in central Myanmar and states inhabited by ethnic minorities — and manufactured electoral consent through coerced voting mandates. They overtly back the military’s proxy party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, through systematic manipulation of the electoral process. In the first phase of the three-phase election, the Union Solidarity and Development Party predictably secured a landslide victory over the controlled opposition parties.
Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing also affirmed that the military will not leave Myanmar’s political theatre until there are no more ethnic armed organisations and the decade-old civil war ends. This means that the junta-supervised elections will not divest the military of its long-held praetorian role in Myanmar politics. Meanwhile, Myanmar has plunged into an acute humanitarian crisis with widespread human rights violations, large-scale population displacement and economic calamity.
ASEAN’s response to the junta-organised elections has been ineffectually passive. The Five-Point Consensus — ASEAN’s focal conflict resolution framework for Myanmar — explicitly stresses the imperative of inclusiveness in Myanmar’s political process. Apart from the decision not to send ASEAN election observers to Myanmar, ASEAN lacks concrete measures on how to guarantee a genuine free and inclusive political process. ASEAN also lacks any contingency plans in case the junta leverages non-ASEAN major powers’ backing to enhance the legitimacy of the sham elections.
In addition to the weak bloc-based position, the policy measures of some individual ASEAN member states are widely seen as tilting towards the junta. Laos pledged to dispatch election observers to Myanmar, echoing Cambodia’s ruling party. Despite his earlier remark that the elections would be neither free nor credible, Thai Minister of Foreign Affairs Sihasak Phuangketkeow met with Min Aung Hlaing on 7 December, urging him to peacefully hand over power after the elections, rather than questioning the electoral process.
Though Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Theresa P Lazaro was appointed as the ASEAN Chair’s special envoy to Myanmar, the probability of positive breakthroughs under the new ASEAN Chair, the Philippines, is low. This is due to the institutional limitations in ASEAN decision-making characterised by consensus requirements and the non-interference-based ASEAN Way, as well as the domestic political challenges of the Marcos Jr administration. Global geopolitical developments including the United States’ softened rhetoric regarding the Myanmar elections and possible conciliatory policy shifts could also influence the Philippines, a key US ally.
The junta regime is not immune to external pressures. China, rather than ASEAN, is dictating the Myanmar political landscape. Beijing’s backing of the elections undermines ASEAN’s mediating role and ASEAN centrality. The Myanmar junta’s Five-Point Roadmap and non-ASEAN powers’ strategic conduct, rather than ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus, are likely to lead Myanmar’s political trajectory.
ASEAN must choose between two paths: adjust institutional frameworks and adopt a proactive policy orientation to affirm ASEAN centrality, or witness a continued diminishment of its influence across other regional security challenges.
The institutional decision-making mechanism, the ASEAN Way, has not achieved a solid position on an array of regional security challenges, including the Myanmar crisis. ASEAN’s institutional design must be compatible with the substantive reality of the bloc’s position for a proactive policy orientation. The prerequisites for such compatibility are adjustments to the ASEAN Way.
Given that Southeast Asian society is sovereignty-centred and pluralistic, it would be unfeasible for ASEAN to abandon consensus and non-interference principles in favour of more robust interventions as seen in other regional organisations, like the Economic Community of West African States. But this does not preclude nuanced institutional adjustments for proactive and effective policy orientation. ASEAN can take a common bloc-based position on Myanmar’s elections based on democratic norms, starting with non-recognition of the sham elections, followed by ASEAN-centred proactive engagements with interested dialogue partners to encourage credible elections and an inclusive political process.
The ASEAN Charter allows for flexible decision-making and implementation of the ASEAN Minus X formula for more willing and proactive member states in the economic sphere when consensus cannot be reached. Exploring this formula in relation to the Myanmar elections could serve as a starting point for more fruitful policy initiatives. In this way, ASEAN can reach a common position on the Myanmar elections and assert its centrality, while transcending its internal fragmentation.
Myat Sandar Zaw is a final year student of the Bachelor of Science International Relations programme at the University of London.
Source: News wire @ Myanmar’s election is a litmus test for ASEAN centrality | East Asia Forum
