Tsvangirai favourite despite popularity drop

Bulawayo – Support for Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai plunged by 21 percentage points from 57 percent in May 2009 to 36 percent in October 2010 but he remains favourite to win a presidential vote in Zimbabwe today, according to the latest survey by polling group Afrobarometer.

The South African-based pollster said at 36 percent, Tsvangirai enjoys twice as much support as long time rival President Robert Mugabe whose popularity was ranked at 18 percent up from 10 percent in May 2009. The survey was carried out by the Mass Public Opinion Institute (MPOI), an independent political think-tank based Harare.

University of Zimbabwe political scientist Eldred Masunungure and the Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM)’s Anyway Ndapwadza supervised the study, while the briefing paper was prepared by Michael Bratton, a senior adviser at Afrobarometer. The survey covered the period of the inclusive government from 2009 to 2010.

“Earlier surveys have documented a general trend of declining popular support for Zanu (PF) and a gradually rising mass preference for MDC-Tsvangirai,” said Afrobarometer, which been has tracking political party preferences of Zimbabweans since 1999.

“But the trend has occasionally been interrupted by periods of temporary resurgence in stated loyalties to Zanu (PF), for example, around the time of the 2005 parliamentary elections, when the MDC lost seats in the House of Assembly,” it added.

The survey showed that the next elections are most likely to be dominated by two parties, MDC-T and Zanu (PF). “In the last three surveys, including in October 2010, no minor party — including MDC-Mutambara, Mavambo-Kusile-Dawn (MKD) led by Simba Makoni, and the revived Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union (ZAPU) under Dumiso Dabengwa – has ever garnered more than one percent of the intended vote,” Afrobarometer said.

The survey also found that fear was widespread among potential voters with a third of the 1 200 people interviewed refusing to state their preferences to the researchers. A large number of people said they were not sure how they would vote while 7 percent said they would not vote at all. “All told, therefore, the partisan preferences of 44 percent of the Zimbabwean electorate are today unknown, mainly because people are increasingly reluctant to reveal these affiliations to survey researchers.”

Afrobarometer cautioned, however, that the present data “should not be used to make predictions about any forthcoming election, especially one whose date has yet to be announced” as almost half of all adults were not willing to reveal their voting intentions. Instead, the organisation speculated that activists across the political spectrum “will interpret the data to their own partisan advantage”.

“Proponents of Zanu (PF) may be tempted to see early evidence of their party’s resurgence, perhaps bolstered by an electoral and military war chest extracted from newly exploited diamond fields. “Adherents of MDC-T will have cause to wonder whether the party’s strategy of building political support via service delivery is enough to guarantee an absolute electoral majority in the absence of a parallel effort to rebuild the party’s grassroots organisation,” the survey noted.

Afrobarometer said because of Zanu (PF)’s daily threats of civil war if their party loses the next election, it was “entirely understandable” that people should conceal their voting intentions.

Zimbabwe’s three ruling parties have differed on when the next elections should be held with the MDC formations calling for polls once a new constitution is in place while Zanu (PF) has said it wants elections this year with or without a new charter. The Zimbabwean