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25910 Posts in 9966 Topics by 982 Members Latest Member: - Ferguson Most online today: 75 (July 03, 2005, 06:25:30 PM)
+  Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum
|-+  AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
| |-+  Zimbabwe
| | |-+  Zanu-PF Gains Seats
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Author Topic: Zanu-PF Gains Seats  (Read 8668 times)
PatriotWarrior
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« on: April 03, 2005, 09:00:50 AM »

Last Updated: Saturday, 2 April 2005



By Herald Reporters

Zanu-PF is set for a two-thirds majority of both elected seats and the whole Parliament with complete and near complete results indicating that it won 81 seats in Thursday’s poll, with the MDC on 38 and a single independent coming through.

Zanu-PF pushed its share of the valid vote by almost 10 percent to around 58 percent, enough to push the MDC out of its strip of marginal and near marginal rural seats along the Eastern Highlands, and take the bulk of a swathe of seats across Matabeleland South and the southern Midlands that the two parties had shared in 2000.

The MDC share of the vote fell less than 8 percent to around 40 percent as it and Zanu-PF squeezed out the independents and minor opposition parties. These minor candidates saw their share of the vote drop from more than 5 percent to less than 1 percent as the two-party system became more entrenched in Zimbabwe.

The only independent or third party candidate to win a seat was Professor Jonathan Moyo in Tsholotsho, and he only managed just over 40 percent of the vote in a bruising three-way fight with the two dominant parties.

Neither major party was able to make much headway in the core constituencies of the other. The MDC won all 31 pure urban constituencies and Zanu-PF consolidated its dominance and in many cases boosted its majorities in rural Mashonaland, Masvingo, most of rural Midlands and much of rural Manicaland.

Zanu-PF was able to take one seat in a metropolitan province, the mixed urban-rural Harare South, by fielding the sitting city councillor but failed to grab any of the pure urban seats. It repeated this success in the other mixed seats such as Chinhoyi and Chegutu across most of the country outside Matabeleland.

The MDC, besides retaining its near stranglehold on the cities, managed to remain a major force in rural Matabeleland, although it did lose significant ground there. But outside the two western rural provinces it did not win a single non-urban seat.

In 2000 the MDC won many of the small number of constituencies that can be described as marginal or near marginal. On Thursday almost all of these moved into the Zanu-PF camp, sometimes with modest majorities, reflecting Zanu-PF’s greater share of the popular vote.

Zanu-PF’s bigger block of constituencies that it can win with large majorities means that the MDC has to win the bulk of marginals and near marginals — seats where support is more evenly divided and which do change hands fairly easily — if it is to come close to parity with the ruling party.

It is this block of around 20 or so marginals and near marginals that allows small shifts in popular support to be converted into quite big shifts in the size of parliamentary blocs.

With 120 elected constituency MPs, Zanu-PF’s tally of 81 gives it one more than a two-thirds majority of this group of MPs. The 81 will be joined in Parliament by the eight governors and the 12 presidential appointees to give 101 MPs taking the Zanu-PF whip. This is just one more than the Constitution requires to effect constitutional change.

However, Zanu-PF is usually joined in parliamentary votes by the block of 10 chiefs, elected by their colleagues in the eight provincial chiefs’ councils and the national council of chiefs. However, these elected chiefs do not take the Zanu-PF whip nor fall under party discipline. Their support generally has to be negotiated, rather than taken for granted.

http://www.zimbabweherald.com/index.php?id=42143&pubdate=2005-04-02


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Ayinde
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« Reply #1 on: April 03, 2005, 12:53:20 PM »

S. Africa endorses Zimbabwe's parliamentary poll
South Africa said Saturday that Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections which gave the ruling party a favorable majority reflected the will of the people. "It is the view of the mission that the 2005 parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe reflect the free will of the people of Zimbabwe," said South African Labor Minister Membathisi Mdladlana,who led a observer mission for the elections.

Mdladlana said the elections on Thursday "by and large" conformed to election guidelines adopted by Southern African Development Community leaders last year for holding a democratic vote. President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections but the opposition Movement for DemocraticChange (MDC) labeled the just ended the sixth parliamentary poll as unfair.

ANALYSIS: Zimbabwe opposition seek options vs Mugabe
Zimbabwe's opposition, defeated again in polls it says were rigged, risks slipping into obscurity unless it can come up with fresh ways to challenge President Robert Mugabe. Political analysts said the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) miscaculated when it bowed to pressure to contest parliamentary polls at the last minute -- leaving it poorly prepared to fight an election its leadership believed was already impossible to win.

Party leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his team may well be persuaded to allow fresh faces to steer the party into presidential elections in 2008 with a radically expanded support base, they said. "They should have foreseen this kind of scenario a few months ago and the leadership of the MDC, its president Morgan Tsvangirai and others, must take the blame," said Nel Marais, of the Executive Research Associates in neighbouring South Africa.

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