By Karen MacGregor

For the past eight years, the majority of Zimbabweans have made it clear that they want to be rid of an increasingly autocratic, corrupt and incompetent Zanu-PF government led by President Robert Mugabe. But in elections Saturday their hopes might for the third time be dashed, amid mounting evidence of large-scale vote rigging that will ensure a poll that is anything but free and fair. Still, with the stiffest competition he has ever faced from two other candidates, Mugabe’s sacked finance minister Simba Makoni and opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe is holding its breath for polling results that are expected to begin rolling in on Sunday.

Polling stations around the country were open for 12 hours on Saturday, with an electorate of just under six million people voting for president as well as members of a 210-seat parliament and local councils. Security has been tight but voting appeared to proceed peacefully--though extremely slowly at urban stations, where most opposition supporters reside. Almost all Western journalists have been denied accreditation to cover the election, and only observers from “friendly,” mostly African countries, have been invited. Zimbabweans abroad, now thought to number more than three million of a former population of 13 million people--many of them opposition supporters who have fled to South Africa to escape intimidation and economic collapse--have not been allowed to vote.

The past eight years have been a nightmare for most Zimbabweans. In 2000 Mugabe had already been in power for 20 years, and in February of that year citizens said, “no” to him in a referendum on constitutional changes. Faced for the first time with a real threat to his rule, Mugabe--once the darling of the West for running sub-Saharan Africa's major post-colonial success story--reacted with ruthless speed in cracking down on a swelling trade union-led opposition movement and white farmers, whom he perceived as its funders. Since then white farmers have been chased off their land, thousands of opposition supporters have been assaulted (and many killed) by security forces and militia, draconian laws have been passed, corruption has run rampant and the economy has collapsed. Inflation is running at 100,000 percent and unemployment at 80 percent.

Until recently, not much attention was being paid to the 2008 election, given the allegations of rigging and numerous shenanigans during previous polls (before 2000 Zimbabwe was a de facto one-party state). It was assumed that Mugabe would win, no matter how many votes he did or did not receive. And that Tsvangirai, now leading a splintered Movement for Democratic Change, would take yet another drubbing. But then last month Makoni, 57, a man from the Zanu-PF inner circle who had reportedly given up trying to reform the party from within, made a surprise entry into the contest--and invigorated it. It was, says University of Zimbabwe political scientist Dr John Makumbe, “exhilarating. What Makoni did was throw the electoral process a lifeline. People who thought they couldn’t be bothered to vote started scampering to get registered, and there has been a lot of debate”.

Zimbabweans could be grasping at straws. There are enormous obstacles to democratic change, including a security apparatus which has said it will not accept any result other than a Mugabe win. But given the staggering scale of economic collapse, this poll might yet prove to be competitive.