Harare/Johannesburg - Despite the bloody nose given his party in Saturday's parliamentary elections the party of longtime Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe appeared ready Thursday to soldier on in his increasingly desperate bid to cling to power. "President Mugabe is going to fight to the last," Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga told the BBC, denting but not entirely quashing hopes that 84-year-old Mugabe would finally call it a day.
Although the results of the presidential election also held Saturday have yet to be released Matonga predicted Mugabe would square off against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai in a runoff - as called if neither candidate takes more than 50 per cent of votes.
"This time we will be ready," Matonga vowed, as Mugabe made his first public appearance since the elections, looking, by all accounts, relaxed.
Mugabe's appeared on national TV, not as was feverishly predicted two days ago to announce he was finally relinquishing power, but to bid farewell to a group of African Union election observers.
"He wants to go down fighting," Achille Mbembe, a political analyst at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, remarked. "He came into politics as a man who fights and doesn't want to be perceived as someone who is running away."
Five days after Zimbabwe's combined presidential, parliamentary and local elections the country is convulsed by one question: will the tyrannical "old man" who has ruled the country for all of its 28- year post-independence history fight another day or will he finally go.
The initial silence emanating from State House after the opposition claimed victory early in the elections was interpreted as a positive sign. "He's floored by his his bad showing," members of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change trumpeted, claiming a 67 per cent victory. "He doesn't know what to do."
After the optimism came anxiety as the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission sat on the results for 24 hours before starting to drip feed them at the rate of 70 parliamentary seats a day. "They are rigging the result," the MDC cried.
The mood swung back to optimism as the final results came in showing a not-quite-67-per-cent but a convincing MDC victory over Mugabe's Zanu-PF party in the 210-seat House of Assembly- 109 seats to Zanu's 97 - dealing the party its first defeat in a general election since 1980.
The presidential result has yet to come in but the verdict for Mugabe, deemed less popular than his party, is not expected to be any more forgiving.
"That is democracy. Democracy is, you change government when people decide," South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said. "I mean when your time is over, your time is over."
But like so many of Africa's "big men" leaders who have refused to go quietly into retirement Robert Mugabe appeared ready Thursday to go another round.
The MDC, who claim Tsvangirai won the vote outright with 50.3 per cent of the vote, had begged Mugabe to save himself the "humiliation" of a runoff, which must be held within three weeks if neither candidate takes more than 50 per cent plus one ballot.
Analysts fear bloodshed in what would be seen as a do-or-die contest by both sides. Matonga vowed Zanu-PF would throw everything it had at a second round, raising fears of a return to the police brutality against opposition supporters that has marked election campaigns in the past.
"It will be very violent," Mbembe said.
But not everyone is convinced Zimbabwe's cliffhanger election will culminate in a runoff. The MDC and Zanu-PF are engaged, according to several sources, in furious behind-the-scenes horse-trading.
The slow release of the results and the talk of a runoff could be part of a ploy to buy more time for the talks, in which neighbouring African countries are believed to have a hand.
Among the possible other outcomes of the talks that have been floated are the formation of a transitional unity government.
A meeting of Zanu-PF's politburo (inner circle) scheduled for Friday is also expected to give a clearer indication of whether Mugabe will make his last stand or as, Tutu hopes, "step down with dignity, gracefully."
