Zimbabwe President Mugabe re-elected amid fraud claims

President Robert Mugabe.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe has won a seventh term in office, officials say, amid claims of electoral fraud.

Mr. Mugabe, 89, won 61% of the vote, against Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s 34%.

Mr. Tsvangirai earlier said the elections for parliament and president were fraudulent and promised to take legal action. He said his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would no longer work with Mr. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.

The two parties have been working together in a coalition since the last election in 2008 sparked widespread violence.

Results from this week’s parliamentary election showed the MDC had been trounced, winning just 49 seats compared with Zanu-PF’s 158.

In a news conference before the presidential result was announced, Mr. Tsvangirai said Zimbabwe was “in mourning”.

“The fraudulent and stolen election has launched Zimbabwe into a constitutional, political and economic crisis,” he said.

He said he would produce a dossier of the alleged electoral fraud and he called on the southern African regional bloc, SADC, to investigate.

His MDC colleagues had earlier called for a campaign of civil disobedience to isolate Zanu-PF.

The European Union, which maintains sanctions on Mr. Mugabe and his senior aides, said it was concerned about “alleged irregularities and reports of incomplete participation” in the election.

The largest group of domestic monitors, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), had said problems with voter registration had left up to one million people unable to cast their ballots, most of them in MDC strongholds.

On Saturday, one of the nine members of the election commission resigned over the way the election was conducted.

Commissioner Mkhululi Nyathi said in his resignation letter: “While throughout the whole process I retained some measure of hope that the integrity of the whole process could be salvaged along the way, this was not to be.”

However, the African Union and SADC broadly endorsed the election, and South Africa challenged critics to produce evidence of ballot fraud.

Mr. Mugabe has been president since Zimbabwe won independence from the UK in 1980.

culled from Punch