After 25 years of campaigning for free elections in Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has at long last been able to hold some elections of its own. Last weekend almost 1,000 NLD delegates mustered in Yangon to elect a central committee.

The irony was that not all members of the party were thrilled with the idea. After years of operating clandestinely under repressive military rule, the party is struggling to make the transition to a modern political organisation capable of taking the reins of power. Older members, some of whom spent years being tortured in the country’s grisly jails, resent the fact that younger upstarts are moving in.

Ructions and jealousies are inevitable as the former opposition adjusts to the changes that have swept the country since the junta gave way to a form of controlled democracy in 2010. In many ways, Myanmar – which has held free by-elections, taken an axe to censorship and re-established diplomatic ties with the west – has come far further than almost anyone predicted even two years ago.