{{Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai dismissed Zimbabwe’s election as a farce on Thursday after his rival President Robert Mugabe’s party claimed a landslide victory that would secure another five years in power for Africa’s oldest head of state.}}
Speaking at the headquarters of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a dejected Tsvangirai said Wednesday’s vote should be considered invalid because of polling day irregularities and vote-rigging by 89-year-old Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.
“This has been a huge farce,” he told reporters. “In our view, that election is null and void.” He did not take questions, leaving it unclear whether he or his party would mount any kind of legal challenge.
The conflicting claims from the competing camps came before Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission had issued any official results.
There are fears that an acrimonious post-election dispute could spill over into violence, as happened after the last election in 2008, when 200 MDC supporters were killed in the wake of a first-round defeat for Mugabe, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980.
Wednesday’s poll was peaceful, but the largest independent observer group said it was seriously compromised because of voter registration problems that might have disenfranchised up to a million people – a fifth of all Zimbabweans of voting age.
Releasing unofficial results early is illegal, and police had said they would arrest anybody who did this.
However, a senior source in Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, who asked not to be named, told Reuters less than 15 hours after the polls closed that the result was already clear.
“We’ve taken this election. We’ve buried the MDC. We never had any doubt that we were going to win,” the source said.
A vote tally compiled throughout the day by South Africa-based private Zimbabwean channel 1st TV indicated that ZANU-PF had swept the board in the parliamentary vote, with many of the Western-backed MDC’s top leadership losing their seats.
The station, using tallies posted at polling stations around the country, said ZANU-PF had won 93 seats in parliament to the MDC’s 33, a massive swing from 2008. It was not confident enough to declare the remaining 84 seats.
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