Zimbabwean President declared winner, opposition rejects results

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) announced that President Mnangagwa received about 50% of the vote, while his main rival, Nelson Chamisa, leader of the opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), won 44% of the vote, according to Reuters.

Supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party began singing and cheering after ZEC declared President Mnangagwa the winner.

Meanwhile, a CCC spokesman wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that the party rejected "any results that were hastily compiled without proper verification".

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa attends an event in Goromonzi (Zimbabwe) on July 5.

President Mnangagwa (81 years old), who succeeded longtime leader Robert Mugabe after a coup in 2017, is widely expected to win a second term as analysts say the contest is heavily tilted towards ZANU-PF, the party that has held power in Zimbabwe for more than four decades.

ZANU-PF has denied it had an unfair advantage or sought to influence the election outcome through fraud.

Although the election was largely free of violence, police routinely banned opposition rallies and arrested opposition supporters using Zimbabwe's strict public order laws.

Earlier, the European Union's observer mission said the vote in Zimbabwe was held in a "climate of fear". The Southern African regional bloc's SADC delegation also noted problems such as delays in voting, a ban on protests and biased coverage in state media.

Nicole Beardsworth, a politics lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said she thought the ZEC’s announcement of the election results late on August 26 was likely a response to criticism from SADC and other election observers. “We all had a lot of questions about the speed with which the ZEC announced the presidential election results,” Beardsworth said.

Voting in Zimbabwe's presidential and parliamentary elections this week was initially scheduled to end in one day on August 23, but was extended to August 24 in some areas after ballots were late.

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