The 2000 general election was played out against the backdrop of national liberation damands and a Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) stoking the fires of nationalism. But the Zanu-PF campaign slogan, ‘land is the economy, the economy is the land’, was not merely revolutionary nostalgia. Rather, it was explicitly backed up by an army of ‘war veterans’. and implicitly at least, by the police and armed forces. Leading the charge was President Robert Mugabe, whose populist rhetoric and criticisms of Rhodesian, British, and American interference in Zimbabwean sovereignty added much heat if little light to Zimbabwe’s political and economic situation.
The 2000 election promised change, not only in the form of the rising strength of the first substantial opposition to Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe’s 20 years of independence, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), but also by raising the possibility of succession from within Zanu-PF. Though the election was marked by neither an MDC victory, nor an immediate shake-up within the ruling party hierarchy, it did promise to unleash a profoundly new phase of politics in Zimbabwe.