Zimbabwe's Parliamentary Election of 2005: The Myth of New Electoral Laws

In the run-up to the March 2005 parliamentary election in Zimbabwe, the ruling party introduced two new electoral laws. It effectively marketed these laws as ‘new’ and ‘democratic’ to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), whose guidelines for a democratic election were the benchmark for assessing the legitimacy of the election. Rather than evaluating these laws in relation to the SADC guidelines, as most analysts and political organisations did, the article examines the new electoral laws in the context of the electoral rules which the regime had introduced ahead of the 2000 parliamentary and the 2002 presidential elections. Adopting this perspective, the article documents for the first time how the parliamentary laws largely reproduced the undemocratic electoral rules which the executive had hastily introduced ahead of the 2000 and 2002 national elections to entrench its power. The Zimbabwe case illustrates how an authoritarian regime may use the rhetoric of democratic reform to conceal its hegemonic project.