Testing Ties: Opposition and Power-Sharing Negotiations in Zimbabwe

This paper analyses the dynamic relations between Zimbabwe's opposition MDC-T party, civic organisations and western governments during the country's 2008 power-sharing negotiations. Because of the high stakes of the negotiations, civic organisations and western governments tried to influence their historical ally, the MDC-T; they wanted the opposition party to adopt an intransigent stance in its negotiations with ZANU(PF) in order to gain further concessions. The MDC-T largely rejected these influences, however, in part due to pressure from Southern African leaders. Aiming to gain regional legitimacy, the party felt compelled to actively reject western influences to counter its construction by ZANU(PF) as a ‘puppet of the west’. Yet the inability of western governments to affect the MDC-T's position during the negotiation period went beyond the opposition's desire to improve its standing within the region. Through the analytical lens of nested games, this article reconstructs how both the MDC-T and western governments view the relation between short-term divisions of power and long-term democratisation in Zimbabwe. This reconstruction demonstrates a disconnect between donor countries and the MDC-T in the assumptions, short-term priorities and long-term objectives driving their decisions. This article further discusses the MDC-T's decision to sideline civic organisations from the negotiation process, and demonstrates that this decision proved particularly harmful because of strategic errors made by the MDC-T in the process of exclusion.