Zimbabwe before and after the June 2000 elections: an assessment (continued)
Although the February 2000 constitutional referendum emboldened and mobilized the opposition to an unprecedented degree, this would not necessarily translate into an electoral landslide. The referendum defeat showed ZANU PF to be vulnerable at the polls, and the result took a divided and ill-prepared ruling party by surprise. But in the parliamentary elections, ZANU PF's tactics, brutal as they were, dominated the agenda. Government politicians with good constituency networks found it easier to influence voters on a personal basis; this seemed absent during the referendum. The ruling party was running scared and this produced some internal reform, the axing of a few strategic political figures and the retiring of others, and the appearance of some new candidates. On the other hand, the party's youth and women's leagues, always active against opposition parties in previous elections, were again playing the role of "enforcer" - there were numerous attacks on MDC and ZUD candidates, as well as on an informal group of independent candidates, some being ZANU PF defectors. Unfortunately, the MDC's Tsvangirai and ZUD's Dongo were barely on speaking terms and unlikely to reach an agreement in constituencies where a split opposition vote would play into the hands of ZANU PF.
However, senior ZANU PF officials conceded that the elections would be a close-run affair. They accepted that they would lose the country's two biggest cities, Harare and Bulawayo; and, maybe, other big towns such as Masvingo, where the vote was regarded as fluid. But they insisted they could hold the countryside where close to 70% of the electorate live. Independent polls showed that there had been important changes in the rural areas since the 1995 elections. As economic conditions in the towns worsened, fewer workers had been able to send back funds to their extended families in the countryside. And criticism of the ZANU PF government by Zimbabwe's relatively well-educated population (the beneficiaries of state largesse in the 1980s) was growing fast. The ruling party knew its popularity was at an all-time low. A recent Helen Suzman Foundation survey among 1 900 households, 1 000 of them rural, found that 68% of the respondents believed that their living standards had deteriorated during the past five years. Among those advocating political change, 71% believed that their living standards had declined - and even among ZANU PF supporters, the percentage was 62. However, the critical vote lay with the first-time voters, the so-called "born-frees", the more than 35% of the electorate born after 1980 who are frustrated by the economic collapse and have no established allegiance to ZANU PF.
Even though the electorate voted against the acceptance of a new constitution (giving the president more powers) in the February 2000 referendum, if these results were to be replicated in a general election then it still would have delivered a slim victory to ZANU PF due to the first-past-the-post electoral system. Estimates from the constituency breakdown of the referendum vote indicated ZANU PF would have won 63 seats in parliament had it been a general election, to which have to be added the president's right to allocate an additional 30 seats; the MDC "yes"-vote would have won 57 seats. For the MDC to defeat ZANU PF in the parliamentary elections it needed to win 76 of the 120 contested constituencies, which was still unlikely. Though few observers believed that the MDC could attain an outright win, even in free and fair elections, many expected it to get anything between 40 and 70 of the 120 contested seats. And if the MDC won more than 60 seats - that is, more than half the contested seats - it may have caused a constitutional crisis. Although Mugabe as president has the right to nominate 30 members of the National Assembly and the MDC could insist on a power-sharing government, those who know Mugabe say he would reject political co-habitation à la the Mitterrand and Chirac regimes in France. Essentially vain, arrogant and stubborn, Mugabe's accumulation of personal power has made him quite oblivious of the needs of the ordinary people - this is the stuff of megalomaniac dictators.
In the final analysis: although the MDC had substantial and rapidly growing support, ZANU PF was still expected to win the election due to the following factors:
- its strong rural support base;
- the harassing, intimidation and, even, torture of opposition supporters;
- the outdated electoral roll - which meant many young voters who supported the MDC were not registered, as well as the disenfranchisement of Zimbabweans living abroad;
- massive electoral rigging; and
- the nature of the composition of the Zimbabwean parliament (which is composed of 150 seats, but with 30 members directly appointed by the president).
However, on the eve of the June 2000 elections the situation in Zimbabwe was still extremely volatile and there were numerous sparks that could ignite the process and lead to escalating violence spiralling out of control. Although in such an eventuality a state of emergency could be declared and the election delayed, or the military might have sought to intervene in the political process, both outcomes were highly unlikely. One should also remember that what brought regime change in Zambia in 1991 and in Malawi in 1994 was a critical convergence of internal opposition (from political parties, trade unions, churches and non-governmental organizations) and external pressure (from donor countries, advocacy groups and international agencies). Although the timeframe in the run-up to Zimbabwean elections was much shorter (a mere nine months) than in the case of its two northern neighbours, a similar developing convergence might well have had a profound effect on the outcome of the parliamentary poll.