Election Results in Mali and Zimbabwe.

Rather annoyingly both Mali and Zimbabwe have today released their election results on the same day. However I don't think it is any great secret that the Mali election was specifically timed to coincide with the Zimbabwe election in order to put maximum pressure on African nations particularly South Africa.

In Zimbabwe it is only the results of the Parliamentary vote that have been announced. The results of the Presidential vote will come later. However it is clear that Mugabe's ZANU-PF party have won a landslide victory winning 142 of the 210 Parliamentary seats giving them more than a 2/3rds majority. Obviously we are still waiting for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and the various observer missions to publish their reports but such is the scale of ZANU-PF's victory even if all of the small scale of alleged voting irregularities were found to be true they wouldn't be enough to affect the outcome of the election. The fact that ZANU-PF now have a more than 2/3rds Parliamentary majority means that they now have the power to amend the national constitution which will be highly controversial. Therefore while they won't change the overall outcome these allegations of voting irregularity will need to be looked at carefully. However at this point everybody is tensely waiting to see whether the MDC-T will follow through on it's threat to bring its supporters out onto the streets to challenge the election result. Hopefully they won't.

The situation in Mali is slightly more complicated because their Presidential vote has resulted in no candidate gaining the 50% of the vote needed to win outright. This means that that two leading candidates Ibrahim Boubacar Keita who received 39.2% of the vote and Soumaila Cisse who received 19.4% of the vote will now go head to head in a run-off vote scheduled for August 11th (11/8/13). Apart from the fact they both have strong democratic credentials and a feud dating back more than a decade I don't really know enough about either candidate to comment further at this point. However the election run-off seems the sensible way to proceed because Cisse in particular has made some very loud and aggressive accusations of vote rigging and election irregularities. The run-off gives the opportunity for these allegations to be resolved by a new vote.

16:50 on 2/8/13


Edited at around 21:20 on 3/8/13 to add;

Today the result of the Zimbabwean Presidential election have been released. They show Robert Mugabe winning a substantial victory with 61% of the vote over Morgan Tsvangirai's 34% of the vote. As a result Mugabe has passed the 50% threshold winning the Presidency outright with no need for a run-off vote.

Having made his position quite clear before voting even began it goes without saying that Tsvangirai has accused Mugabe of election fraud and pledged to contest the result in Court. However as with the Parliamentary vote the scale of Mugabe's victory means that any irregularities that have been alleged so far would not be sufficient to change the outcome of the vote. Therefore we can only hope that Tsvangirai and the MDC-T respect the Court's decision and accept their defeat graciously rather than bringing their supporters to the streets in protest.