Zimbabwe's Election May Be a Botched Robbery

So decrepit is the regime of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe that his party almost lost a parliamentary election despite an energetic campaign to steal it. The ruling ZANU-PF party, which previously held all but three seats in the countrys legislature, lost 58 of the 120 seats contested at the weekend and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change immediately vowed to challenge the result in a further 20 in which the ruling party won by less than 500 votes. European Union observers proclaimed the two-day election anything but "free and fair" in light of a systematic campaign of violent intimidation by the ruling ZANU-PF, which the opposition blamed for their failure to unseat Mugabes party.

Despite retaining power, the results are a stunning reversal for the party that led the liberation war against white minority rule and has ruled the country, with Mugabe at its head, ever since independence 20 years ago. ZANU campaigned on the basis of its liberation war record, attempting to demonize the opposition by casting them as stooges of the country's 70,000 remaining whites. The centerpiece of Mugabe's campaign has been the mass occupation by squatters of some 870 of the country's 4,000 white-owned farms, which occupy the best 70 percent of Zimbabwe's arable land while millions of black subsistence farmers scratch out a living on the remainder. All this was accompanied by at least 40 killings, incidences of kidnapping and torture of opposition candidates, confiscation of identity documents and fraudulent alteration of voter rolls.

ZANU-PF did best in the countryside, where its demagoguery over land-reform struck a deep chord among section of the rural poor. But the party was roundly trounced in the urban areas (and even many rural constituencies) where voters viewed the government's sudden interest in "redistributing" white farms as a cynical attempt at exploiting rural misery to deflect attention from its own legacy of corruption, catastrophic economic mismanagement, military misadventures and violent suppression of dissent.

Not that the result is likely to make much difference to the immediate plans of the man who has ruled Zimbabwe as a personal fiefdom for the past 20 years. "ZANU-PF will form the government whatever the results," the party's national chairman, John Nkomo, vowed over the weekend. "Mugabe can have a cabinet of just five if he wants. Mugabe is an institution." But the president faces reelection in 2002, and Tuesdays result may portend worse to come for the ruling party. The immediate danger is that the greater the challenge Mugabe perceives, the more desperate he becomes: The land invasions and accompanying violence began only after Mugabe lost a referendum in February that would have dramatically increased his constitutional powers. Then again, for the ZANU apparatchiks whose well-being depends on control over the state, their mauling at the polls could be taken as a cue to retire the 75-year-old strongman before he has to face the voters.