President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party secured a two-thirds majority on Saturday, winning 71 seats which along with 30 seats appointed directly by the president carried it to a major victory.
Mugabe (81) will be able to rewrite the Constitution unopposed, that could help him prepare his retirement, expected in 2008. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 39 seats in the parliamentary elections held on Thursday, according to incomplete results.
The MDC has lead the urban vote in the capital Harare and Zimbabwe’s second largest city, Bulawayo, while Mugabe’s Zanu-PF took the rural vote.
Mugabe gained stronger support in the countryside for his seizures of white-owned farms, but observers fear that voters in isolated and sparsely populated rural constituencies are also more easily intimidated than those in the towns.
”We do not accept that this represents the national sentiment,” said Tsvangirai. ”The government has fraudulently, once again, betrayed the people. We believe that the people of Zimbabwe must defend their vote and their right to free and fair elections.”
”He [Mugabe] is going to do what he wants, this is his private property and for people to even claim that this is a democratic process, when it is so fraudulent, is totally not acceptable,” said Tsvangirai, although he added that he did not plan to challenge the results in court.
The MDC went into the election holding 51 seats, but admitted that it could end up with only 40.
Tsvangirai said his party would do more than simply appeal against the result in the courts, which the government has packed with sympathetic judges. But he would not say what action it would take.
Previous attempts at protest have been violently crushed by security forces and members of the ruling party’s youth militia. The MDC has avoided confrontation in recent years.
The US said the voting process had been tainted. ”The election process all along has been tilted in favour of the government,” said Richard Boucher, a spokesman for the state department.
Former colonial ruler Britain said the vote was ”seriously flawed,” with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw saying Mugabe had ”yet again denied ordinary Zimbabweans a free and fair opportunity to vote, further prolonging the political and economic crisis he has inflicted on their country”.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the elections were neither free nor fair.
”Although the campaign and election day itself were generally peaceful, the election process was not free and fair. The electoral playing field was heavily tilted in the government’s favor,” Rice said in a statement on Friday.
She also called on the government to address ”political and economic problems that have wrecked what only a few years ago was one of Africa’s success stories”.
Controversy surrounded the election of Mugabe’s nephew, Patrick Zhawao, a Zanu-PF candidate, in Manyame constituency, south-west of Harare. Election officials announced on Thursday night that about 15 000 people had voted. They then said yesterday morning that the total turnout was 24 000, and that Zhawao had received more than 15 000 votes.
”I won. I was leading. Suddenly I hear about 24 000 votes, and I don’t know where the extra 10 000 came from,” said the losing MDC candidate, Hilda Mafudze.
”It is the first example of what we are going to start seeing from here on.”
As Zanu-PF supporters carried a mock coffin representing the MDC through the constituency, election officials refused to comment on the discrepancy in their figures. The officials said they doubted there was any rigging.
Before the voting, Mugabe changed electoral law to allow army officers, largely loyal to the ruling party, to serve as election officials.
Opponents of Mugabe drew comfort from the fact that his party had failed to recapture Zimbabwe’s cities. Iden Wetherell, a senior journalist with two of the last remaining independent newspapers, said: ”The youth, the educated, the skilled are in the cities. They are the future of Zimbabwe and they have rejected Mugabe again, against all odds. They are completely alienated from him.”
An MDC source said the party had not decided what to do next: ”This is crunch time. What can 40 seats in parliament do? We know that taking the legal route, challenging the elections in the courts, will lead nowhere. Do we call people to mass action? That is difficult to do.”
Following international pressure to hold a legitimate election, Mugabe allowed the MDC to campaign and hold rallies in the run-up to the vote.
Opposition supporters suffered less violence than in previous election campaigns, but in some rural areas MDC voters were denied access to state-controlled grain supplies.
Tactics used to fix the poll included inflating the voters’ roll with ”ghost voters” and denying the MDC access to state-controlled media.
An independent monitoring group, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said up to 25% of those who tried to vote had been turned away because their names did not appear on the electoral roll or they failed to present proper identification. State electoral officials said about 10% of voters had been turned away from polling stations. Turnout was about 42%, compared with 48% in the 2000 general election.
Independent Zimbabwean rights groups and the United States, whose diplomats observed the campaign and voting, agreed with Tsvangirai that the polls were seriously flawed.
Though this campaign had been relatively peaceful, they said bloodletting and intimidation in previous years had already skewed the poll in favour of Mugabe’s party.
But observers from neighbouring countries largely sympathetic to Mugabe said Thursday’s poll was conducted in an ”open, transparent and professional manner.” But they said in a statement they were concerned about the high number of people who were unable to cast ballots.
The 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) also endorsed a 2002 presidential poll Western observers said was marred by widespread violence, intimidation and vote rigging.
Under international pressure to produce a credible result, Mugabe’s government and party ratcheted down the violence in the last weeks of campaigning before Thursday’s vote.
The MDC won 57 of the 120 elected seats in the last legislative poll in 2000, but lost six of them in subsequent by-elections. In 2002, Tsvangirai was narrowly declared loser of the presidential poll.
The independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network, which deployed 6 000 observers nationwide, said as many as a quarter of those who tried to vote before 3.15pm (1.15pm GMT) on Thursday were turned away because their names did not appear on the voter roll, or they failed to present proper identification.
George Chiweshe, a former army officer who heads the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, conceded some were turned away but said the problem was not as big as the independent group estimated. He said 116 198 of the 1,4-million people who tried to vote before 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) — less than 10% — were not allowed.
The country was plunged into political and economic chaos when Mugabe’s government began seizing thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans after the last legislative poll in 2000. Combined with years of drought, the often violent program has crippled agriculture — the country’s economic base.
The past five years have also seen a crackdown on dissent. Restrictive security and media laws were passed, opposition leaders jailed, and a number of independent newspapers shut down.
Moyo makes a comeback
President Robert Mugabe’s disgraced right-hand man, Jonathan Moyo, was elected on Friday as an independent candidate in parliamentary polls in Zimbabwe, the election commission said.
Moyo (48) won victory in Tsholotsho, a poor rural area in southwestern Matabeleland where he was born, dealing a blow to Mugabe who had threatened to ”isolate” Tsholotsho if the villagers handed the seat to his newest arch-foe.
Mugabe’s former information minister and architect of Zimbabwe’s repressive media laws, Moyo fell out of favour with his mentor in December in a row over party leadership changes.
He was expelled from the party for allegedly plotting to challenge Mugabe’s choice of Joyce Mujuru as vice-president at a Zanu-PF Congress held in December and was fired from the cabinet last month.
Moyo won 8 208 votes, close to 3 000 more than the local ZANU-PF candidate, results showed.
”The Zanu-PF leadership is panicking because of my participation as an independent in Tsholotsho and this has forced them to remember that there should be development in Tsholotsho,” said Moyo when he voted on Thursday.
Speaking at a campaign rally in this village, 600 kilometres (400 miles) west of the capital, Mugabe said he had advised Moyo ”if you stand as an independent the whole machinery of the (Zanu) party will fall onto you and you will get demolished, you can never win against Zanu-PF.” – Sapa-AFP , Sapa-AP, Guardian Unlimited Â