Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa is elected to a second term

According to the official count, the incumbent leader has more than 50% of the votes.

The electoral commission of Zimbabwe announced on Sunday that President Emmerson Mnangagwa had won re-election for a second term.

Mnangagwa received 52.6% of the vote, according to the chairwoman of the panel, Priscilla Chigumba. According to the official results, Nelson Chamisa, the leader of the opposition, finished second with 44% of the vote.

The ZANU-PF, Mnangagwa’s party, expressed gratitude to supporters and hailed the outcome as “a well-deserved victory” for the president-elect. Referencing the government’s economic growth plan, “We will continue to deliver on our targets as we march towards Vision 2030,” the party tweeted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The official results were disregarded by Chamisa’s Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC). The party claimed in a statement that there had been “egregious abuse” and vote suppression during the election. The party declared that it had started an impartial audit of the vote tally.

The opposition as well as foreign observers criticised the government for “irregularities” during the voting. When polls initially closed on Wednesday, officials had not yet distributed paper ballots to several polling places in the nation’s capital, Harare, as well as some rural areas. Mnangagwa decided to extend the voting period by one more day as a result of the delays.

The focus of the campaigning was on the country’s political future in the wake of the 2017 military coup that toppled Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s longtime leader, as well as social issues like corruption and the high unemployment rate.

Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s vice president, took over as president after the takeover. In 2018, he won a full five-year term. At that particular election, the opposition also contested the results.