Brian Stephens, Harare
"We're in it to win", read the giant banner hanging off the headquarters of the Movement for Democratic Change in Harare during Zimbabwe's general elections.
The opposition MDC's 41 seats were mainly won in the major cities of Harare and Bulawayo while the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), won most of its 78 seats in the countryside.
The partisan distribution of food aid, the threats and intimidation against whole communities, the manipulation of electoral boundaries and voting lists — all no doubt played a part in the ZANU-PF victory.
However, given that it won 57 seats in 2000, under much worse conditions of state-sponsored violence and extreme intimidation, the MDC should have polled much better this time round.
The MDC did only decide to run at the last minute, as it had previously been, in effect, carrying out a boycott by refusing to even run in by-elections. For this reason, many MDC supporters didn't bother to register when they become old enough to vote or changed their address.
Organisations such as the National Constituent Assembly continued the call for a boycott throughout the campaign.
However, violence was minimal, some access was granted to the MDC on state-controlled public media and large MDC rallies were held in what were previously no-go rural areas.
Despite what it had threatened before the election, now it is over the MDC has failed to mobilise to protest the obvious electoral fraud. The MDC's politicians are also likely to eventually take up their seats in parliament.
In any case, there are indications that Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is moving towards some form of political accommodation with the MDC, and also the international ruling class. He has been easing on anti-democratic moves, while also indicating his willingness to accommodate neoliberal economic policy.
After purging the radical wing of ZANU-PF earlier this year, Mugabe let a bill that would have placed huge restrictions on non-government organisations lapse, and gave the go-ahead for Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono to stay on his neoliberal course.
The land reform is being "sanitised". Vice-President Joseph Msika, two weeks before the elections, called on "new farmers", beneficiaries of the land reform, to work together with the remaining white commercial farmers.
Also, despite winning a constitution-changing majority, Mugabe has promised not to ram through major changes without consulting with the MDC.
Without the support of the urban poor and working classes, Mugabe is unlikely to win his drawn-out battle with pro-Western capitalist forces. However, he has no intention of mobilising workers against the urban capitalists' factories, supermarkets and banks in the same way that he mobilised rural workers to expropriate white farmers.
Mugabe needs a respite. The economy, temporarily held in check for the elections, has now resumed its free fall. Petrol queues have returned and supermarket prices seem to double overnight. Agriculture, the main producer of wealth, is still reeling under the impact of the land reform, and is now threatened by drought.
While a ZANU-PF-MDC deal would help the economy, it would also allow the ruling party to manoeuvre so that the MDC is "in it to lose" the 2008 presidential elections.
However, the democratic space that Mugabe has opened up allows militant workers and communities to organise. A movement to the left of the MDC could form broad rural and urban alliances and create the potential for a true people's power movement "in it to win".
From Green Left Weekly, April 20, 2005.
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