MAPUTO — Mozambique's political parties made their final push for votes Sunday, the last day of campaigning before Wednesday's elections which are widely expected to be won by the ruling party Frelimo.
With Mozambique's opposition divided by a recent split, getting out the vote is seen as crucial in a race where turnout will be the measure of satisfaction for incumbent President Armando Guebuza and Frelimo, which has governed Mozambique since independence in 1975.
"Guebuza's biggest opponent is going to be voter turnout," Anne Pitcher, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "That says as much about Frelimo as a vigorous opposition."
"If they get 36 percent turnout again," she told AFP, referring to the rate from the 2004 election, "it's just a very negative statement about Guebuza's time as president."
Each of the three candidates for president held rallies Sunday in a final bid to get supporters to the polls.
Guebuza and Frelimo held a "show-rally" with music and dancing in Nampula, in northeast Mozambique, the largest electoral district.
"Frelimo and I will work to guarantee national unity, peace and development," Guebuza told supporters. "We will work to guarantee the success of the fight against poverty."
Fourth-time presidential hopeful Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the main opposition Renamo party, arrived on Sunday in Maputo and held a series of rallies throughout the capital.
"Everything is mixed together today in Mozambique. The party, the police, schools, roads, journalists -- everything has to be through Frelimo. This has to stop," he told AFP at the airport.
Daviz Simango, founder of the breakaway party from Renamo, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), closed out his campaign in his hometown of Beira, the country's second-largest city, where he launched his new party in March.
"We need to end the games, end the abuses," Simango told cheering supporters. "There are lots of young people here who don't have jobs. Our hospitals don't have medicine. ... My brothers, we can't stay home on Wednesday."
In all, 17 political parties and two coalitions are competing for ballots from Mozambique's almost 10 million voters in presidential, parliamentary and provincial races.
Wednesday's elections will be the southern African country's fourth since a 1992 peace agreement halted a 16-year civil war and ushered in the first democratic elections in 1994.
Frelimo has overseen a period of rapid growth, with national income expanding by an average eight percent a year for a decade after the war. But lately the boom has slowed, with growth this year forecast at 4.5 percent.
And though many Mozambicans are enjoying newfound prosperity, 90 percent of the population still lives on less than two dollars a day, one of the highest poverty rates in the world.
Yet Renamo, the long-time voice of the opposition, has struggled to convert discontent into votes.
The former rebel group has had difficulty overcoming its image as a guerrilla army that fought a war of destabilisation against the Frelimo government with help from white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.
Some view the emergence of the MDM as a sign that voters are hungry for another option.
MDM leader Simango, a former Renamo member, founded the new party after Renamo refused to run him for re-election as mayor of Beira last year.
He ran as an independent instead and won with 62 percent of the vote. Renamo meanwhile failed to claim a single mayoral race nationwide.
Simango used the momentum from his victory to found the MDM, taking several Renamo leaders with him.
"There is desire on the part of many to break out of the so-called two-party system, which is seen by some as a kind of straitjacket," said John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"I think we really are going to see the end of bipolarity" in Mozambican politics, Pitcher said.
But with Simango racing against the clock, she said, that may have to wait for the next general elections in 2014.
This year, Pitcher said, "I think the real contest is for second place."
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