The Oxford professor bemoans continued authoritarianism and a lack of female participation
heads for national elections on August 23rd, the standard criticisms about the country’s polls have arisen once more. Opposition parties and civil-society groups accuse the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which runs elections, of being biased towards President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front party. Opposition groups complain that they are not receiving fair coverage in state-controlled media outlets.
of intimidating their supporters in the countryside and they maintain that Zimbabwe’s security services are supportive of Mr Mnangagwa andComplaints that the system is rigged are hardly new. The partiality of election-management bodies has been a bone of contention in every Zimbabwean vote since 1985. Opposition parties boycotted past elections in protest at the uneven playing field—for instance in 1995.
But if this election has a business-as-usual feel to it, it is because Mugabe was removed in a coup by military generals. Coups staged by generals tend to be conservative because they have a stake in and benefit from the existing regime. They have little incentive to drive change, which might upend their access to power and privileges.
The record shows they were mistaken. The coup-born government was immediately repressive after the election in July 2018, as seen in the shooting of unarmed civilians by the military in August 2018 and the ruthless crushing of the popular protests against rising fuel prices in January 2019. That the conditions of the current election are just as uneven as in the past is a result of the conservative nature of the coup in 2017. Conservative coups rarely usher in democracy.
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