NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar — Yes, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi would like to be president of Myanmar.

Since her election to Parliament last year, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and the leader of Myanmar’s opposition has alternately dodged the issue, parried it with rhetorical questions of her own and more recently answered with what sounded like a qualified yes.

But on Thursday, speaking to an audience of foreign business executives, she was explicit and unequivocal about her political ambitions.

“I want to run for president,” she told a room packed with executives at a meeting hosted by the World Economic Forum here. “If I pretended that I didn’t want to be president I wouldn’t be honest. And I would rather be honest with my people than otherwise.”

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi was jailed by the military for the better part of two decades, and her ascension to the presidency would be a kind of Mandela moment for this impoverished and formerly hermetic country that is now opening to the world.