Elections scheduled for Wednesday in Zimbabwe are shaping up to be an absolute disaster. They were organized on short notice and without adequate budget, so promise to be plagued with irregularities. Some will be deliberate—the ruling party is expected to rig the vote and violently harass the political opposition—but enormous lines, unprinted ballots, and disorganized polling stations are likely to add to the problems. Given the likelihood of bloodshed—and the Atlantic community’s simmering hatred of President Robert Mugabe, who will be seeking a seventh term in office—Washington seems oddly disinvested in the outcome. Apart from one or two pro-forma calls for a “credible” poll, the administration has been quite silent, and so has the American press.
There are plenty of obvious reasons for the lack of interest in Zimbabwe’s political contest. The first is sheer exhaustion. The second is the absence of any obvious hero to root for: Zimbabwe’s opposition—the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC)—is luckless and fractured. Its would-be president, Morgan Tsvangirai, is fighting a sympathetic uphill battle against a ruling party that has strangled the press and monopolized all the machinery of the state; but he’s had a very long hard life and has lately been devoting his energies to enjoying the time that he has left. It’s an understandably human impulse, but his too-public romances and vacationing have aggravated Western frustration with the MDC, and diluted the enthusiasm of voters on the ground. Many of them don’t actually like the MDC as much as they dislike the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU), whose horrific ineptitude produced inflation rates of 80 billion percent in 2008. This lack of good options at the ballot box may convince them to mirror Washington’s apathy and stay home on Wednesday.
Third, ZANU’s unbreakable hold on the police, civil service and military will make the election results irrelevant. It’s very likely that the MDC would win a free and fair election: Morgan Tsvangirai handily won a first round of voting in 2008. But he was forced to withdraw from a second round in the face of concentrated state violence against his supporters. ZANU will certainly reprise that violence if Mugabe seems to be losing again. The president is propped up by a coterie of brutal military thugs (top among them Emmerson Mnangagwa, Constantine Chiwenga, Perence Shiri and Augustine Chihuri) who have glutted themselves on Zimbabwe’s diamonds and will certainly face imprisonment—or worse—on the day that ZANU falls from power. They simply can’t afford to let that happen. So the military has voiced its support of Mugabe and is clearly at the ready to punish voters from the opposition’s side. The only real question is whether such violence will be necessary, since the election commission has already engaged in such flagrant manipulation of the voter registration process. (It appears that ZANU has managed to register some 90 percent of its supporters, alongside a million or so people who are legally dead but nevertheless expected to cast a vote for “Bob.” In contrast, only thirty to forty percent of MDC supporters have managed the get registration cards.)
Fourth, Washington seems to have accepted that reform is impossible as long as Mugabe is alive. Regime change was an unofficial Washington policy, but seems irrelevant now that Mugabe is 89 years old. Adding to the lack of urgency is the fact that Zimbabwe is no longer an urgent humanitarian disaster: Washington and its allies managed to push Mugabe into a power-sharing arrangement with the MDC in 2008, and the Unity Government has managed to stabilize inflation rates by dollarizing the economy. Stability has reduced pressure to ‘do something’ about Zimbabwe; in fact, international sanctions have been lifted from all but a few of ZANU’s members, so Washington and London can focus on mending fences with the next generation of ZANU leaders (some of whom seem open to reform).
The outcome of the elections seems painfully easy to predict: Mugabe will win, but his victory won’t be credible, and the tarnished outcome will allow Washington, London, and Zimbabwe’s frustrated neighbors to demand an extension of the Unity Government’s mandate. This outcome will be anathema to ZANU and the MDC, but it will ensure a minimum degree of economic policy sanity in the days, months or years that Mugabe has left, and so it will suffice.
The big question is how much violence will be involved in getting to this outcome. There are some indications that ZANU’s rigging will not go as smoothly as Mugabe hopes: two weeks ago, an early round of voting for the police, military, and civil service employees (all of them ZANU loyalists), went badly awry. Poor preparation and a lack of funding led to a shortage of ballots, and only 29,000 of some 70,000 ZANU supporters were able to cast their votes. Riot police were called in to calm the angry crowd, which obviously doesn’t bode well for the conduct of the more complicated general election. It’s also remotely possible that ZANU won’t be able to steal the election: Mugabe’s campaign events have been so poorly attended that the military has already taken to bussing villagers across the country to fill up the stands. If the MDC wins the first round despite ZANU’s manipulation, events will turn violent: targeted assassinations of opposition members will be inevitable; and violence against the general electorate is also perfectly possible, especially if (and when) the masses become disorderly in the wake of ballot shortages and long lines. The bloodshed will surely be short-lived: if Mugabe’s cabal senses an existential threat, the military will quickly surround Harare and block off access to opposition strongholds (most villages were constructed during colonial times and accessible only by one or two roads).
But any violence will be horrible enough, and destructive of African’s fading faith in the practice of democratic elections. Washington should care more, and should be doing more in the run-up to the vote. Sanctions are an empty threat (Mugabe’s dealt with them for years), military intervention is laughably unlikely, and Western election observers have been banned; but the Embassy should at least be preparing to protect MDC leaders from violence. If the top and middle ranks are protected, intimidation will be harder, and the opposition may survive a second round. The MDC may not take over the halls of power, but the psychology of victory matters. In this case, it’s the best the MDC can hope for.
Bronwyn Bruton is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.