The above chart was created by Afro-barometer last year. And as you can see, it was said to give a picture of how the different political parties would fare if the vote was held at that date. Some people are now using it to predict what the outcome of Malawi’s September 16 Election will be.
A couple of months ago another survey from Institute of Public Opinion and Research (IPOR) was published by Times 360 which also aims to predict the election results.
Note that the IPOR survey places Lazarus Chakwera at 26%, which is 3 percentage points less than the 2024 Afrobarometer survey. This means in about a year, Chakwera has lost popularity, whereas Peter Mutharika hasn’t gained in popularity, and still stands at 43%.
Obviously these are mere predictions based on surveys (which are often simplistic and devoid of nuance), and can’t be an accurate representation of the whole electorate. However, they can show what the sentiment was at the time, at a particular place, given the sample size. The important point to note is that they do not represent the whole country, nor account for error margins and other determinants (like some people not revealing their true intentions when they know they are being recorded).
According to the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC), about 7.2 million people have registered to vote. And someone released the table below, which is said to have been derived from official preliminary voter registration statistics released by the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) for the 2025 general elections. It shows how the demographics of the voters look by region.
The above table matters because it can be used to instruct the strategy by which a political party which has a chance of being elected, can take to win a sizeable percentage of votes.
But because of everything that has happened in Malawi in the last 2 years, with new parties having sprung up, with the death of Saulos Chilima, and with Malawi’s economy continuing to experience shocks; and in the absence of electoral alliances, it remains to be seen how voters will actually vote on September 16. This means its somewhat unlikely that any of these so called predictions will be anywhere near accurate. But let’s all wait and see, because an electorate can be deceptive.
Nevertheless, I believe there will be some surprises and among those surprises will be the performance of Michael Usi’s Odya Zake Alibe Mlandu Party, Dalitso Kabambe and UTM, and Kondwani Nankhumwa’s PDP Party. It’s only a hunch, so I could be wrong.
malawiace.com 