HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) -- Polls are opening in Zimbabwe for an election that President Robert Mugabe has promised to make fair and free.
But the European Union and other international observers say his suppression of the opposition has made a sham of the election, calling it "phony."
Thursday's vote pits Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party against the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai.
The 81-year-old Mugabe, who was once the hero of the nation and the darling of the West, has been accused of strong-arming the opposition into silence and is in charge of everything -- from drawing constituency boundaries to vote counting.
And while Zimbabwe's legislature is made up of 150 seats, the voters will fill only 120 of them, with Mugabe appointing the remaining 30.
The opposition, for their part, say their campaigns have been restricted and interfered with by the government, but they are hoping to turn the tide and hand the ruling ZANU-PF party its first defeat since independence 25 years ago.
There are no representatives from the United States, the EU, Britain or the commonwealth among the estimated 500 international observers who will be at the polls.
Reform a 'disaster'
Mugabe has led the former Rhodesia since independence in 1980. But five years ago, he moved to speed up a controversial land acquisition program that effectively took land away from the country's commercial white farmers and handed it out to blacks -- most of them party loyalists.
Many farmers and their workers were killed in the violence that followed, and the country's economic woes have been blamed on the land seizure.
"The land reform program has been a disaster not just in itself, it was a necessary process, we needed to redistribute to deal with historical factors, but because it was ad-hoc, violent and destructive, it didn't result in economic growth and social integration," says political analyst, Brian Nkarogo.
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