In brief: Zimbabwe – 2013 elections

Zimbabwe held presidential and parliamentary elections on 31 July 2013. They resulted in overwhelming victory for President Robert Mugabe and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and shattering defeat for Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T). The elections bring to an end over four years of ‘power-sharing’ under the February 2009 Global Political Agreement (GPA) that followed the violence-ridden elections of 2008, which were stolen by ZANU-PF.

The 2013 elections were certainly extremely flawed – it had been obvious for some time that they would be – but there is no escaping the fact that President Mugabe and ZANU-PF have comprehensively outmanoeuvred their rivals since the GPA was agreed, in the process rebuilding a domestic political constituency on promises of ‘indigenising the economy’, combined with an often ruthless reassertion of a self-proclaimed ‘right to rule’.

This note collects together links to: official statements; recent media coverage and analysis.