Zimbabwe Endorses 11 Election Candidacies Amid Complaints Over High Registration Fees

June 23 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission confirmed this Friday the authorization of eleven candidacies for the presidential elections scheduled for August 2023, after another ten were discarded as many of them could not afford the $20,000 required by legislation.

The opposition has denounced that the current rates, twenty times more than in the previous elections, undermine democracy, since the average salary is below 300 dollars, at a time when Zimbabwe is also going through a difficult economic situation, with shortages of cash.

The current fee to file a candidacy is $20,000 compared to $1,000 in previous elections. In the case of candidates for Parliament, the cost has gone from 50 dollars to 1,000, details the BBC.

Among the eleven proposals, none is a woman, there are those of the president, Emmerson Mnangagwa and his main opposition representative, Nelson Chamisa. Despite all the number of candidates is half that of 2018, after many old applicants have chosen not to participate due to the expensive conditions.

Other candidates are the exiled Savior Kasukuwere, a former minister under the governments of former President Robert Mugabe, and Douglas Mwonzora, the new leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, from which Chamisa was expelled in 2020.

These elections are being held in a context of deep economic crisis and amid accusations of greater repression against the opposition. Mnangagwa has been in office since 2017, after the Army forced Mugabe to resign. Its Zimbabwe African National Union has ruled since independence in 1980.

For his part, Chamisa, second in the 2018 elections, formed the Citizen Coalition for Change (CCC) in 2022, after a court stripped them of the leadership of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 2020.