Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been elected to a second term with 52.6 percent of the vote, the electoral commission has said.
However, the opposition claimed there had been widespread vote-rigging and international observers said the vote fell short of democratic standards.
Mnangagwa is only Zimbabwe’s third president. A 2017 coup against veteran ruler Robert Mugabe put him in charge.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) said Mnangagwa’s main challenger, Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC) candidate Nelson Chamisa, secured 44 percent of the vote.
Mnangagwa received more than 2.3 million votes while Chamisa took 1.9 million, according to the Zec. Voter turnout in the country of almost 16 million was 69 percent, the electoral body said.
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The opposition claims the vote was rigged, but the constitutional court has upheld the result.
A spokesperson for the CCC posted on X—formerly known as Twitter—that the party rejected “any result hastily assembled without proper verification”.
Promise Mkwananzi, a spokesperson for the party, told the AFP news agency that the CCC did not sign the “false” final tally and “cannot accept the results”.
He said the party would announce its next move soon.
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Observer missions from the European Union, Commonwealth and 16-nation Southern African Development Community said they had a number of concerns with the vote, including the banning of opposition rallies, issues with the electoral register, biased state media coverage and voter intimidation.
“The elections were fraught with irregularities and aggrieved the people of Zimbabwe,” political analyst Rejoice Ngwenya told AFP.
The run-up to the election was largely free of violence, but CCC members were convicted of what they describe as fabricated charges aimed at weakening the party. —BBC
