Myanmar’s president is huddling with government ministers Thursday amid an apparent purge of the leadership of the country’s governing party.

President Thein Sein has the upper hand, according to one of his officials.

“This is just a party leadership affair, there is no reason to worry,” Zaw Htay, director of the president’s office told AFP, adding that the president had made the move to remove party chairman Shwe Mann, who is also parliament speaker.

Officials of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) told reporters that Shwe Mann has been ousted from his top party post and the USDP secretary general, Maung Maung Thein, was also removed. Shwe Mann was widely perceived as being more politically accommodating with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi than other more hardline members of his party.

The new chief of the party is vice chairman Htay Oo, according to Reuters, attributing this to a senior party official.

The midnight shakeup, which some reports described as an “internal coup,” came as security forces surrounded USDP headquarters in the capital Naypyidaw early Thursday and prevented officials from leaving.

General elections are scheduled for November, the first in Myanmar, also known as Burma, since decades of military rule ended in 2011.

“The date of the election will not change. Everything else is going to be the same,” Min Zaw Oo of the Myanmar Peace Center told VOA. “I don’t see any significant shakeup in the timeline towards the election.”

President Thein Sein announced at this week’s party convention he would not run stand for re-election as a parliamentary candidate but he could still be nominated again for president.

The USDP is predicting it will prevail in the balloting for which a total of 90 parties have registered candidates.

The leader of the most popular opposition party, the National League for Democracy’s Aung San Suu Kyi, is ineligible to become president due to a constitutional clause that excludes her because her two sons hold foreign citizenship.

The party of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate is to contest almost all of the available seats in parliament and is expected to make heavy gains in the legislature.

The Election Commission’s deadline for parties to submit candidate lists is Friday.

The NLD won the vast majority of parliamentary seats in the 1990 general election while Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest. The military junta refused to recognize the results and continued to rule the country until 2011.

Earlier this week, 149 senior officers retired from their army posts to run as USDP candidates in the upcoming elections. But at the party convention Wednesday, only 59 of the former army officers were accepted as candidates.

“The military officers who are sent to the party, they are not playing any significant role in the reshuffling in the party leadership,” the well-connected academic Min Zaw Oo, in Yangon, told VOA. “I was calling some of the military officers who will be contesting the election and that they don’t even know what’s going on over there.”

Tensions surfaced in June when the USDP backed a motion that would have ended the military’s de facto ability to veto constitutional amendments.

The measure also was backed by the NLD, which had collected five million signatures in support of the reform.

The military, which opposed the measure, has a constitutionally guaranteed 25 percent of seats in parliament, enough to block constitutional reforms it opposes.

Additional reporting by Ingjin Naing and Htet Aung from Naypyidaw, Myanmar.
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