Zimbabwe Election Analysis
Zimbabwe Election Analysis
Zimbabwe went to the polls on 30 July 2018 as constitutionally required, at the end of a five-year term that started in 2013. These elections, however, deviated from normalcy that constitutional scheduling infers, as they followed hard on the heels of the ouster of Zimbabwe’s leader since independence, President Robert Mugabe, at the hands of the military and a ZANU-PF faction in a coup in November 2017, effectively ending Mugabe’s 37-year reign. The coup was followed by the overt deployment of heavy military presence and interference in all spheres of life, including policing services, public spaces, and social service delivery. Hither to, military involvement in all manner of state and public affairs had been covert, and conjectural, but the coup made this overt through the army’s ubiquitous presence for a sustained period of time.
Was this post-coup state legitimate? Without clouding the discussion with abstract notions around the normativity and empirical discussions of legitimacy, in our understanding, there is no state or entity that can be fully legitimate. As such a state’s claims to legitimacy are almost always a function of consent of only part of the population, resting on the consent of the winning coalition within the electorate through the extent to which a regime receives diffuse support. Viewed from this perspective, the legitimacy of the post-coup state in Zimbabwe will always be questioned, but it is reasonable to assume that the coup plotters claim to legitimacy was accepted internally through mass support of citizens and the civilian putsch in political parties in parliament from November 18 to 21, as well as externally through the reluctance of external actors in the international community to recognize the coup and sanction it, preferring instead to label it a military assisted transition.
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