By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 28, 2007

JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 27 -- Zimbabwe's fractured opposition party is preparing to join forces behind a single slate of candidates headed by longtime leader Morgan Tsvangirai in elections scheduled for March, according to party officials.

The decision sets up a rematch between Tsvangirai and President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since the end of white supremacist rule in 1980. Mugabe beat Tsvangirai in 2002 in a presidential election that international observers said was marred by violence and profoundly skewed in favor of the ruling party. Mugabe's party also defeated Tsvangirai's in parliamentary elections in 2005.

Tsvangirai's party, the Movement for Democratic Change, split that same year, and he has struggled ever since to regain his role as the unquestioned leader of the opposition forces. A reunion of the party's two factions would improve its chances of mounting a serious challenge to Mugabe.

"There's an understanding, a realization, that every vote must count, and there is strength in unity," Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for Tsvangirai's faction of the party, said Thursday. "The election in 2008 is crucial for this country."

The party's other faction has not formally embraced Tsvangirai's candidacy but has accepted that his wing of the party will select a presidential nominee as part of a unified slate, spokesman Gabriel Chaibva said. Chaibva expressed no objection to Tsvangirai being that nominee.

"We have had absolutely no problem with even reunification of the party," he said.

Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist, helped form the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999 and has long been its most visible leader. He was charged with treason in 2002 -- but later exonerated -- and was beaten severely by Mugabe's police force in March, along with dozens of other party activists.

Yet Tsvangirai has also faced persistent doubts about his leadership style and capacity to plot a strategy to remove Mugabe despite massive political unrest that has caused millions of Zimbabweans to flee the country, mostly to South Africa.

Leaders of the party's other faction, headed by former robotics professor Arthur Mutambara, have accused Tsvangirai of authoritarian tendencies, echoing charges they have leveled against Mugabe for years. Political analysts also note that Tsvangirai has had difficulty organizing meaningful mass protests against Mugabe's government as it grows steadily more repressive.

"I don't believe that Morgan Tsvangirai has the wherewithal to lead a vibrant, broad-based opposition," said Trevor Ncube, owner of the Zimbabwe Independent and the Standard, two of the nation's few newspapers not under government control. "He's not a unifying factor."

Zimbabwe's long decline began soon after the formation of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe oversaw often-violent invasions of white-owned commercial farms beginning in 2000. Political freedom has dwindled since then, with opposition meetings broken up by force and independent newspapers closed down.

Rampant hyperinflation has devastated a once-thriving industrial and agricultural economy and undermined a school system regarded as among the continent's best. Many Zimbabweans spent this Christmas in line, seeking to swap old currency for new amid a mounting cash shortage. Such basics as sugar and cooking oil have disappeared from the shelves of most stores.