By Lyson Sibande

In my previous post, I argued that both the Democratic Progressive (DPP) and UTM have lost significant votes and that their potential alliance with Alliance for Democracy (AFORD) and United Democratic Front (UDF) may not bring the expected results unless leading parties of DPP and UTM quickly resolve their internal issues.

However, let me clarify that I did not mean that the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) has automatically gained the votes that DPP and UTM have lost. No. Not at all. It does not work like that.

Remember that voters can generally be categorized into two groups: affiliated and non-affiliated voters.

Affiliated voters have a membership and professed support and sympathy towards a particular political party, while non-affiliated voters, do not have sympathy towards a specific party. They are undecided voters, but they eventually align with a party that moves them as the election approaches.

As a result, the voters that UTM has lost due to the sudden demise of Chilima and those that DPP has lost due to the leadership failure of APM, have not all migrated to MCP. Some of them, and possibly more, should be non-affiliated and undecided for now.

Now, looking back at the 2019 elections, MCP secured over 1,780,000 votes. By 2020, following the Tonse Alliance, MCP’s vote count rose to 2.6 million. The alliance partners contributed around 800,000 votes, largely from UTM.

I estimate that MCP hasn’t lost all the 800,000 votes it got from the Tonse Alliance partners. Some voters have left with UTM while others have remained in MCP and others have become non-affiliates.

My estimate is that MCP has retained, so far, around 300,000 of the Tonse Alliance votes. Additionally, I believe that around 150,000 votes will shift from DPP to MCP due to the mistakes made by DPP leadership. Therefore, adding that to the 1,780,000 votes of the 2019 baseline, MCP is likely to have around 2.1 million votes, while, as I mentioned in the earlier post, the DPP “allied forces” are hovering around 1.9 million votes.

You will notice that in my estimates, the MCP’s 2019 votes remain largely intact because they consist of loyal MCP voters. These are individuals who have consistently voted for MCP. MCP kept losing for 26 years, but they never stopped voting for their party and MCP always managed to come in second place in every election. It would be unreasonable to expect MCP voters to abandon the party now when it is in government just because prices of goods have increased and the economy is not doing well. Please, always remember that in Malawi, voting is driven more by loyalty to tribal and regional affiliations than by economic factors or policy considerations. Here, we don’t rationalize party choices and voting decisions.

Therefore, I estimate that next year in September 2025, around 4.1 million voters will cast valid votes, with MCP securing around 2.1 million, representing 51% of the vote, while the DPP allied forces will gather 1.9 million votes, representing 49%. This will be a highly contested race, with MCP winning by a narrow 2-point margin.

This looks like the 1999 Elections when UDF won with 52% against an alliance of MCP, AFORD, and others that got 45% when many believed UDF was going to lose due to rising cost of living and economic problems.

PLEASE, TAKE SCREENSHOTS..

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are those of the author not necessarily of The Maravi Post or the Editor