ABSTRACT
The place of elections in the Zairian political process was shaped in important ways by the circumstances of their initial introduction. The first electoral experiment, introduced unilaterally by the Belgian colonizer at a moment when political evolution remained entirely under Belgian control, was situated in the urban centers where social competition had sharpened new forms of ethnic consciousness and solidarity. The new forms of ethnic consciousness and solidarity established ethnic patterns of electoral mobilization that were to be expressed with much greater force in the 1960 elections. The conviction that unrestrained political competition would overwhelm a fragile polity seeped into the public consciousness, paving the way for the establishment of a unitary, presidentialist, neo-Leopoldian state by Mobutu Sese Seko in 1965. Elections were held again in 1977 but Mobutu soon discovered the incompatibilities of autocracy and democracy, and moved to empty the 1977 reforms of their substance.
