A constitutional amendment passed by a two-thirds majority would keep President Emmerson Mnangagwa in office until 2030 and hand parliament the power to choose future presidents.
Zimbabwe’s lower house of parliament has approved sweeping constitutional changes that would extend President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s time in office by two years and fundamentally alter how the country elects its president, deepening a months-long political crisis over the limits of executive power.
The bill passed with 216 votes in favour and 42 against, clearing the two-thirds majority required to amend the constitution. It now moves to the Senate, where the ruling ZANU-PF party also holds a commanding presence, before going to Mnangagwa for his signature.
The changes are far-reaching. Presidential and parliamentary terms would be extended from five years to seven, pushing the next general election from 2028 to 2030. More significantly, the bill scraps direct presidential elections entirely, replacing them with a system in which members of parliament would elect the president. The Speaker of Parliament announced the results after weeks of heated debate that, at points, spilled into open confrontation inside and outside the chamber.
A long-running campaign finally delivered
The vote is the culmination of a drive that began in earnest at ZANU-PF’s annual conference in October 2025, when delegates passed a resolution directing the government to put in place the legal changes needed to keep Mnangagwa in office beyond his current term. The Justice Minister formally tabled the bill in the lower house on 3 June 2026.
Mnangagwa came to power in November 2017, when a military intervention ended the long rule of Robert Mugabe. He won elections in 2018 and again in 2023, both of which opposition parties and international observers disputed. Under the constitution that has been in place since 2013, he is barred from seeking re-election and his term ends in 2028.
Party loyalists framed the push to extend his rule as a response to popular demand for continuity and stability. Critics saw it as a straightforward attempt to entrench one man’s hold on power by dismantling the very rules designed to prevent it.
Opposition drowned out, not absent
The path to Thursday’s vote was not smooth. Public hearings on the bill were marred by violence and intimidation. Opposition lawmakers and civil society representatives walked out of consultative sessions in April after their members were harassed. A human rights lawyer was physically attacked at a hearing in Harare, with his phone taken and glasses broken. Human Rights Watch documented a pattern of crackdowns against those who spoke out against the amendments.
Opposition figures were unequivocal in their rejection of the bill. Former Citizens Coalition for Change leader Nelson Chamisa said any constitutional changes could only bind ZANU-PF members and not the Zimbabwean people. Another opposition figure, Tendai Biti, pledged to defend the constitution against what he described as a politically dangerous agenda. A smaller party, FORUS, formally petitioned parliament to reject the bill, arguing that Section 328(7) of the constitution explicitly bars a sitting president from personally benefiting from any changes to term limits.
Those arguments were tested in court. Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court dismissed a legal challenge seeking to block the bill earlier this week, clearing the way for the parliamentary vote. The court’s ruling removed what had been seen as the single most consequential obstacle to the amendment’s passage.
What the changes mean in practice
The move to replace direct presidential elections with a parliamentary vote is, in many ways, the more lasting change. Even if a future president were eventually term-limited, the mechanism for choosing one would shift power from ordinary voters to a chamber where ZANU-PF has long dominated. Critics say this makes democratic accountability structurally harder to achieve, regardless of which individual occupies the presidency.
Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution was itself the product of a negotiated political settlement designed to check the kind of unchecked executive power that defined the Mugabe era. Its two-term limit and referendum requirements for major changes were deliberate safeguards. The current amendment bypasses the referendum route, a point that opposition lawyers and civil society groups have consistently raised.
ZANU-PF has governed Zimbabwe without interruption since independence in 1980. The party’s ability to marshal a two-thirds majority in the lower house reflects both the scale of its parliamentary dominance and the limited institutional capacity of a divided opposition to mount an effective check.
What comes next
The bill now heads to the Senate. If approved there, as is widely expected, it will be sent to Mnangagwa for assent. Should he sign it into law, the 2028 elections will be formally deferred, and the next presidential vote will take place in 2030 under a system in which MPs, not voters, will make the final choice.
For Zimbabwe’s citizens, the practical consequences extend well beyond the question of who holds office. A longer electoral cycle reduces the frequency with which governments can be held to account at the ballot box. The removal of direct presidential elections takes away a mechanism that, however imperfect in practice, has historically given voters a formal channel to register dissatisfaction with those in power. Whether the Senate or any remaining legal avenue can alter the bill’s course is the question that now hangs over Harare.
