Zimbabwe: Reading between the political lines

By Stephen Chan  

The Africa Report - Monday, 28 October 2013

The big questions – leadership succession in the two main parties, economic strategy and foreign policy – remain unanswered despite the peak of international interest in the elections. But many voters wanted little more than to avoid the murderous violence of 2008.

The ease with which Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won the 31 July 2013 elections was like a dawn where all seems calm, but the storm clouds sit on the horizon. Those elections were won because of two key reasons.
The first was because Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) performed appallingly. Outwardly confident, it made the same mistakes it had in previous elections – as if internal reflection, self-criticism and learning from mistakes were impossible.
The second was because ZANU-PF took advantage of all the opportunities available to it to 'condition' the election. Many said ZANU-PF stole it. The problem with the accusations of a stolen election was that evidence collated from local instances of electoral malpractice could not be extrapolated into one national picture.
All the accusations assumed a single 'rig' and none of the civic and observer groups examined the possibility of several strategies to ensure victory.

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