Reality catches up with them all in the end, even with political operators as skilled as Robert Mugabe at muffling and intimidating opposition. Against all expectations, including his own, Zimbabwe’s parliamentary election campaign has burst into defiant life. Whatever the ballot boxes entrusted to military and police election “organisers” are declared to contain after the polls close on Thursday — a matter Mr Mugabe is not expected to leave to simple electoral arithmetic — there is now no gainsaying the impatience of millions of Zimbabweans for change.

The raised fist of the ruling Zanu (PF), once the symbol of national liberation, now signifies repression, intolerance and a capricious authoritarianism that has ruined the lives of all but an unjustly favoured few. One of Africa’s most developed countries is now its fastest declining economy. With the collapse of commercial agriculture, and the industries that serviced it, four out of five people have no job, hyperinflation has destroyed what savings they had, and hunger afflicts half the nation. Mr Mugabe offers no panaceas, instead harping on anticolonialism in a hysterical “anti-Blair” campaign. This has backfired. People hardly need telling that Mr Mugabe, not Mr Blair, is their President, and that after 25 years in power, their increasingly desperate state is his responsibility.

In great crowds and, more perilously, in small village gatherings where the feared Zanu (PF) militias keep close count of the “disloyal”, people are rallying instead to the more appealing symbolism of the open palm of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has presented a detailed programme of reforms — and above all, holds out the promise of “a new beginning”.

The chances of that new beginning remain remote. Mr Mugabe has given himself ample means to treat opposition votes with contempt. He may have hoped, as the MDC feared, that voter apathy about an election whose result was seen to be a foregone conclusion would enable him to control the campaign as well — and that he could afford a few weeks ago the “democratic” gesture of ordering Zanu (PF) militias to desist from breaking up opposition rallies and beating up MDC supporters. But in the relative calm that has ensued, there has occurred a profound shift in the national mood.

If the MDC were to win a popular majority, manipulating the result could now risk mass unrest. Pius Ncube, the outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, declares that if cheated in this election, Zimbabweans should “really organise” to expel Mr Mugabe “by a non-violent, popular, mass uprising”. Zimbabwe’s ruthless military, not to mention its tightly controlled media and poor communications and the neighbouring countries’ shameful tolerance of President Mugabe, all make a surge of people power, Ukraine-style, unlikely. The response to people power could be violent. But without peaceful democratic change, violence will surely come to Zimbabwe. It is not only out of concern for democracy that this week’s elections matter to the world.