Mugabe Wins Majority to Continue Reforms
HARARE, Zimbabwe – President Robert Mugabe’s ruling party won a two-thirds majority in disputed parliamentary elections, giving him enough seats to press ahead with his plans to change Zimbabwe’s constitution to further strengthen his grip on power.
According to interim results released Saturday, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won 71 seats, compared to 39 for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
An independent candidate gained one seat and nine results were still outstanding for the 120-seat chamber. Mugabe has the power to appoint another 30 seats.
Mugabe has long said he aimed for a two-thirds majority to enable him to amend the constitution and establish a second parliamentary chamber – a senate. Critics accuse him of wanting to pack the chamber with his cronies.
Zimbabwe’s main opposition MDC was meeting to decide how to press its claims that it was robbed of victory. Its total fell short of the 57 seats it won in the last parliamentary elections in 2000.
It has shied from confrontation after past street protests were violently crushed, preferring to fight its battles in the courts – now packed with judges sympathetic to Mugabe. Much will depend on whether Zimbabweans believe their votes were ignored, and whether that moves them to protest or leaves them bitterly resigned.
“The government has fraudulently, once again, betrayed the people,” Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai said. “We believe the people of Zimbabwe must defend their vote and their right to free and fair elections.”
Mugabe, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders and the last on the continent who has ruled his country since the departure of a colonial power, had hoped Thursday’s poll would give a stamp of legitimacy to his increasingly isolated and autocratic regime. But Western diplomats and independent rights groups said it was skewed by Mugabe’s long history of violence.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice criticized the elections as “heavily tilted in the government’s favor.”
She estimated that more than 10 percent of would-be voters were turned away from polling stations due to irregularities with voter registration rolls.
“The independent press was muzzled, freedom of assembly was constrained, food was used as a weapon to sway hungry voters and millions of Zimbabweans who have been forced by the nation’s economic collapse to emigrate were disenfranchised,” Rice said Friday.
The estimated 3.4 million Zimbabweans who live abroad – more than 20 percent of the population – have been barred from voting.
As an example of irregularities, Tsvangirai cited the race in Manyame, 25 miles southwest of Harare, where Mugabe’s nephew was declared the winner. Election officials announced Thursday night that 14,812 people voted in that constituency. But early Friday, they changed the total to 24,000 and said Mugabe’s nephew got more than 15,000 votes.
Under international pressure to produce a credible result, Mugabe’s security forces and supporters refrained from violence in the last weeks of campaigning and on election day.
The London-based rights group Amnesty International decried the arrest of some 250 women activists who tried to hold a prayer vigil in downtown Harare shortly before the polls closed. Some were beaten and severely injured before they were released, Amnesty said.
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 3:15 p.m. Thursday were turned away because they did not appear on the voter roll or failed to present proper identification. Electoral officials acknowledged there were problems, but disputed the group’s figures.
Mugabe had rejected complaints about the election as “nonsense.”
Observers from neighboring countries largely sympathetic to Mugabe said Friday that the election was conducted in an “open, transparent and professional manner.” They did, though, express concern about the high number of people who were unable to cast ballots.
The 14-member Southern African Development Community also endorsed the 2002 presidential election that Western observers called seriously flawed.
Mugabe tried to rally support after the opposition’s strong showing in the 2000 parliamentary elections with a land reform program aimed at righting racial imbalances in ownership inherited from British rule. Thousands of white-owned commercial farms were redistributed to black Zimbabweans in an often violent campaign that has crippled the country’s agriculture-based economy, also hit by drought.
Mugabe’s government also cracked down on dissent, arresting critics and shutting down a series of independent newspapers.
The architect of Zimbabwe’s repressive media laws, Jonathan Moyo, was the only independent candidate to win a seat as of late Friday. Mugabe dismissed the former information minister after Moyo challenged the president’s authority over the appointment of the country’s first woman vice president, a position that could put the holder in line to succeed the 81-year-old leader.