By Godfrey Tembo.
Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South) – The Afrobarometer report that has stirred so much debate in the political circles of the country is reproduced below.
The opinion poll has revealed that the supposed anathema to the country’s political landscape, the opposition grand coalition, won’t bring the supposed win envisaged by many.
This has drawn the ire of some whilst others have dismissed the report as an alarmist report.
Below is the report and can be downloaded in full at the end of the article:
The widely-discussed idea of a grand coalition of Zimbabwe’s opposition parties to improve their chances of defeating the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in next year’s elections has powerful support among partisans of the main opposition party, Afrobarometer’s most recent survey shows.
In post-independence Zimbabwe, the opposition has been marked by fragmentation – a fact that cost them the presidency in the March 2008 elections when the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) under Morgan Tsvangirai scored a plurality but fell short of a majority.
The opposition has been at its feeblest since its heavy (albeit controversial) defeat in the 2013 elections, when the ZANU-PF achieved a more than two-thirds majority, which it has increased via by-elections boycotted by the MDC-T. Since 2013, the number of opposition parties has grown rapidly; there are reportedly now more than four dozen, although fewer than half a dozen are considered “serious” national parties.
The disorganized state of the opposition has prompted widespread talk in opposition and civil-society circles about the need for a pre-electoral “grand coalition” of opposition parties to challenge the ZANU-PF in the highly anticipated elections, expected around mid-2018.
Download the full statement at the link below:
http://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/press-release/zimbabwe/zim_r7_pr4_grand_coalition_in_zimbabwe.pdf
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