A New Twilight in Zimababwe: The Perils of Power Sharing

So far, most analyses of Zimbabwe’s 2013 elections have focused more on whether the contests were rigged than on why four years of power sharing failed to level the electoral playing field. In the author’s view, there are two main reasons that power sharing undermined—rather than enhanced—the prospects for democratization in Zimbabwe. First, there were significant flaws in the structure and the implementation of the 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA), the three-party accord that governed the power-sharing arrangement. Second, power sharing brought the opposition into government, reducing its ability to run as an outside challenger and making it difficult for the party o claim credit for concrete policy gains.