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Zimbabweans are called to ballot on Monday to elect their president, MPs and city councilors in historic polls, the first since the fall of President Robert Mugabe, who ruled for nearly four decades, plunging the country into serious economic crisis.
A total of 23 candidates – a record – are vying for the presidential election. But the race is between current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, boss of Zanu-PF, the party in power since independence in 1980, and opponent Nelson Chamisa, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). 19659002] The first, 75-year-old former right-hand man of comrade "Bob", claims to have taken a step back from his past as the Mugabe regime's cacique and promised to restore democracy and put a beleaguered economy back on track.
The second, aged only 40, relies on his youth to seduce an electorate determined to end the old political guard.
President Mnangagwa plays big: he intends to get through the ballot the legitimacy of power . He took over in November from President Mugabe, pushed to the exit by the army and his own party, Zanu-PF, who refused that his whimsical and ambitious wife, Grace Mugabe, would succeed him when the time came.
conditions, these elections are an opportunity for the nonagenarian Mugabe to settle his accounts.
At a surprise press conference on Sunday, the former president called on voters to bring down Zanu-PF.
"I hope tomorrow's vote (Monday) will bring down the military form "current government," he said from his luxurious Blue Roof residence in Harare where he spent a golden retirement.
"I can not vote for those who have treated me badly", he continued, before implying that he would give his voice to Nelson Chamisa, whose training he has always fought.
– "New Democracy" –
This election will be "the most contested in our history" President Mnangagwa warned on Sunday.
The gap in the polls between the two leading presidential candidates – who are running for the first time in the supreme office – has recently narrowed.
million. Mnangagwa is credited with 40% of the vote, against 37% for Mr. Chamisa, according to a survey published ten days ago by the Afrobarometer group.
If no candidate obtains the absolute majority on Monday, a second round will be organized September 8.
Throughout the campaign, President Mnangagwa, proudly wearing a scarf in the colors of his country, promised the apogee of a "new democracy" and billions of dollars of investment to put back an economy devastated by the crisis and the catastrophic reforms of its predecessor.
He also committed to holding free, fair and transparent elections, against the backdrop of fraud and violence that greatly tarnished Mugabe era polls
But critics doubt, recalling that he was one of the executors of the Mugabe era repression.
During the 2018 campaign, the opposition moreover stopped denouncing irr Mr. Chamisa has already considered that the elections would, in his view, very likely to be fraught with fraud.
– "Changes" –
The United Nations, however, worried about "intimidation" and "threats of violence and harbadment" of voters before the polls, but they also hailed "the enlargement of democratic space in Zimbabwe."
"Let's give it a chance" to Emmerson Mnangagwa, said Paddington Mujeyi, a perfume seller of 30 years. "For the past few months, we have seen changes on the liberty side – we are not harbaded like Mugabe's time," he told AFP in Harare.
Mark Moyo, a young unemployed person from 21 years old, did not make the same choice. "Certainly, we are not sure" that the MDC "will bring change, but it is a risk that is worth taking because the party in place has not kept its promises," he said. -he thinks.
As a whole, the election campaign was rather quiet, except for a bomb attack that targeted the president last month in Bulawayo, in the south, and caused two deaths.
For the first time since sixteen years, Western observers, including from the European Union (EU) and the Commonwealth, have been invited to monitor the polls throughout the country.
Polling stations, where some 5.6 million Voters, must be open Monday from 07:00 to 19:00 (from 05:00 to 17:00 GMT). Results are expected by August 4.
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