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Trick
or treat? - The effects of the Pre-election climate on the poll
in the 2005 Zimbabwe
Parliamentary elections
Tony Reeler & Kuda Chitsike, Institute for Democracry in
South Africa (IDASA)
June 2005
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Background
While
elections are not the only rubric for determining the legitimacy
of a state, they have become increasingly important. In Zimbabwe,
in the past five years, elections have been elevated to the only
constitutive principle for determining legitimacy, aided considerably
by the position of the African nations, and South Africa in particular.
The rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, human rights
and good governance, while generally accepted as additionally crucial
to legitimacy and democracy, have been minimised in the Zimbabwe
context by African countries, but not by the Western world in general.
African countries, frequently led by South Africa, have been responsible
not only for validating elections, but also for quashing motions
in international meetings that would have been condemnatory of Zimbabwe’s
recent record in the observance of human rights and the rule of
law.
Thus, apart
from the adverse report by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’
Rights recently accepted by the African Union (AU), Zimbabwe has
escaped formal disapproval of its human rights record. The consequence
of this has been a greater focus upon elections than should be necessary
and an even greater emphasis on elections as the only test of Zimbabwe’s
legitimacy.
It was clear
from the outset that the 2005 parliamentary elections would be controversial.
However, in contrast to the 2000 parliamentary and 2002 presidential
elections, it seemed possible that, with the promulgation of the
Southern African Development Community Principles and Guidelines
Governing Democratic Elections, there would at least be some form
of agreed standards for assessing the acceptability of these elections.
There was some hope that these standards would allow any dispute
over the outcome of the elections to be resolved but, as can be
seen now, this was a forlorn hope. There remains the same polarisation
both within and without Zimbabwe that existed before the election.
There is no consensus on the legitimacy of the government and the
crisis seems not only to be persisting, but to be even worsening.
Does democracy
hinge mainly upon elections and will elections provide both the
necessary and sufficient conditions for the consensus that is needed
for a modern democracy? Elections clearly provide both the validation
for a particular regime to govern and they underpin the legal basis
for the structure of the state. But, as Carothers pointed out, states
and regimes can govern way short of the conditions that might describe
a democracy1. In Africa the most frequent
case is that countries display "feckless pluralism", with
competitive elections alternating regimes, but little substantial
development, either economically or socially; or "dominant
power politics", with entrenched elites, weak opposition, rigged
or unfair elections and little in the way of social justice. Zimbabwe
would seem to epitomise the latter characterisation, but Zimbabwe
is not alone in this. As Bratton has argued, much of Africa is governed
by what might be termed "liberal autocracies":
Covering
more than half the continent’s countries and over two-third of
its population, liberalized autocracies derive their ethos from
previous military and one-party arrangements, now adapted for
survival in a more open environment. Leaders in these systems
may pay lip service to basic political freedoms, for example by
allowing token opposition.But they govern in heavy-handed fashion,
typically placing strict limits on the independent press, civic
organizations and political parties to the point even of imprisoning
their strongest opponents or barring them from contesting elections.
As evidenced by recent multiparty contests in Cameroon, Côte
d’Ivoire, and Kenya (before 2002), elections are nominally competitive
but are seriously flawed by ethnic conflict and the fact that
the opposition can never win. At the extreme, as in Chad and Liberia,
elections are the only available antidote to violence: voters
calculate that the best prospects for peace lie in voting armed
strongmen into office, and granting them hegemonic power, rather
than allowing them to continue to prosecute a civil war. Even
once-democratic regimes, like Côte d’Ivoire and Zimbabwe,
may slide back into these forms of autocracy due to power grabs
by military or civilian elites.2
Guinea-Bissau,
Gabon, Kenya, Central African Republic, Gambia, Togo, Ethiopia,
Cameroon and Zimbabwe fall into what Bratton terms competitive liberal
autocracies, while Burkina Faso, Comoros, Congo-Brazzaville, Uganda,
Mauritania, Chad, Guinea, Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia,
and Equatorial Guinea are described as hegemonic liberal autocracies
or, in Carothers’ terms, examples of "dominant power politics".
It can be debated whether Zimbabwe represents an example of a competitive
liberal autocracy, a hegemonic liberal autocracy or an example of
dominant power politics. However, whatever classification is used,
elections do not seem to have moved these states much along the
road to "deep democracy" and this was one of the problems
to be faced in the 2005 parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe.
As it turned
out the road to "deep democracy" disclosed a new and startling
development: Zanu PF, which had been in power during five years
of massive economic and social decline in Zimbabwe, was re-elected
with a huge majority. That this was unusual in the world of politics
is an understatement. But there was more to come. The Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) showed a loss of support in its usual base,
the urban areas, and an increase in its share of the rural vote.
This too was hard to understand: that the MDC would lose support
in the towns was possible, but that they would find increased support
in the rural areas seemed implausible. Although some may claim this
might have been a consequence of the more "open" election
process, it does rather fly in the face of the reports in the past
few years that Zanu PF was ensuring the rural areas were "no
go" areas for the MDC. Whatever the polling peculiarities of
the 2005 elections, the overall result was remarkable: few countries
return sitting governments to power when those governments have
presided over a massive decline in the fortunes of their individual
citizens, let alone return them with hugely increased majorities.
The converse is more usual.
How then to
understand this election? This report examines the pre-election
climate in 2005 and attempts to understand the above anomalies,
as well as what effect the pre-election climate might have had on
the polling. It examines the results in the light of existing "hard
data" on the pre-election climate, particularly information
provided by the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), which produced
the most systematic reporting of the pre-election climate.3
It does not deal with the issues that have led to accusations of
electoral fraud, but merely tries to assess what effect the recent
and not-so-recent past might have had on the elections and the results.
1. Carothers,
T., 2002. The end of the transition paradigm, Journal of Democracy,
13:1, 5-21.
2. Bratton, M., 2004. State building and democratization in Sub-Saharan
Africa: Forwards, backwards, or together? Working Paper No. 43,
Afrobarometer.
3. National Constitutional Assembly, 2005. The 2005 Parliamentary
Election: Flawed, Unfree, and Unfair!. April 2005. Harare: National
Constitutional Assembly.
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full report
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