Tanzania: The Authoritarian Landslide

Abstract

On 28 October 2020, Tanzania held a pivotal election. In one sense, no Tanzanian election has ever been pivotal. None has ever led to an alternation in power between government and opposition. Since it won independence from the United Kingdom in 1961, Tanzania has been ruled by the same party, now known as CCM (Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or the Party of the Revolution). Until 1992, CCM ruled through a formally single-party regime. Since then, it has ruled through an ostensibly multiparty regime by deploying authoritarian measures to maintain an electoral lead.Regarding the bottom line, this approach has worked-CCM has won all its elections. Yet by 2015, the approach was proving increasingly unsustainable-CCM had steadily lost ground at the polls. In 2005, it won the presidential election with an unassailable 80 percent of the vote; the leading opposition candidate won only 12 percent. Ten years later, CCM's vote share fell to 58 percent, while the leading opposition candidate's rose to 40 percent. For all CCM's advantages, its support was shrinking.In this sense, the 2020 election was pivotal. CCM rolled back its losses. President John Pombe Magufuli (1959-2021) won a second five-year term with 84 percent of the official vote, the highest share recorded in a presidential election since multipartism was reintroduced three decades ago. In the parliamentary contests, CCM's gains were even more overwhelming. It won 93 percent of the elected seats in the National Assembly. 1 The party had gained a similar proportion of the local-council seats, and 99 percent of the local-government positions in 2019. Altogether, CCM is now just digits away from being the only party to hold any elected offices. Tanzania's single-party history feels as contemporary as ever. 2 The CCM sweep was an authoritarian landslide, achieved through electoral manipulation that was unprecedented in both scale and audac-

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“…Tanzania is ruled by an electoral-authoritarian regime (Paget, 2017(Paget, , 2021. I anonymize all interviewees save those whose political views are publicly known to protect them from the state.…”