Zimbabwe is caught up in a crisis that could not be severer. Not for the first time, President Robert Mugabe demonstrated that he is not prepared to relinquish his power, even though poll results may show him up as the loser: at the presidential, senatorial, parliamentary, and local elections that were held in March 2008, the challenger, Morgan Tsvangirai, and the opposition parties united in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 47.9 percent of the vote, leaving the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) behind at 43.2 percent.