IF YOU take President Robert Mugabe's recent declaration at face value, Zimbabwe will have another general election by the end of next year. That will be three-and-a-half years after his long-ruling Zanu-PF party indisputably lost to the rival Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Morgan Tsvangirai (right, above), but then refused to concede. Mr Tsvangirai, as compensation, became a distinctly second-fiddle prime minister. Next time, despite all the tricks Mr Mugabe and his party are sure to play, they could well lose again. There is at least a chance that the president will step down and that, at last, less fettered power will be handed to Mr Tsvangirai.

Many—perhaps most—perceptive Zimbabweans think such a prospect fanciful. Why, they ask, should the thugs round Mr Mugabe behave any differently next time, especially when their own ill-gotten gains are at stake? And yet, though the economy is still in ruins, politics messy and human rights persistently violated, the picture is definitely less bad than it was two years ago. It is widely considered, with good reason, that Mr Mugabe is running rings round Mr Tsvangirai and is preventing the MDC and its allies from enjoying their rights as a majority in parliament. All the same, a steady momentum is growing for change—and against Mr Mugabe.

Moreover, though recent reports of the 86-year-old leader's impending demise were based on his occasional sleepiness at official functions and a stumble or two on ceremonial steps, plainly he could drop dead tomorrow. Behind the scenes, feuding within the ruling party over the succession is getting hotter.

Last electoral time round, at the end of March 2008, the playing field was so heavily tilted against the MDC that few thought it could win—yet it did so clearly, albeit by a narrow official margin. Mr Mugabe also decisively lost the first round of the presidential poll, held on the same day, to Mr Tsvangirai. Only after a bizarre five-week silence from a terrified electoral commission did Mr Mugabe, bolstered by his security men and their lethal machinery of repression, declare that Mr Tsvangirai had fallen just short of the required 50%. The shaken president then set about bludgeoning the challenger and his MDC into submission—resulting, after the murder of at least 200 MDC supporters, in Mr Tsvangirai's withdrawal from the run-off some three bloody months later.

After that, while the MDC and its allies had a slim majority in the lower house of parliament, Zimbabwe's slide into ruin continued. Within months of Mr Mugabe's re-election as president, inflation had reached several billion per cent a year. Eventually, early last year, Zimbabwe's own currency was abolished altogether, to be replaced by the American dollar.

Shortly afterwards, a government of national unity (known jokingly as the Gnu) took office. Five months earlier the two main parties, plus a breakaway from the MDC under Arthur Mutambara, had signed a “global political agreement” (GPA), spelling out how power would be shared. Mr Mugabe remained president and Mr Tsvangirai became prime minister, with Mr Mutambara as his deputy.

Since then, things have undoubtedly improved. The economy's dollarisation is by far the biggest factor in Zimbabwe's fragile recovery. As the Zimbabwe dollar gradually became worthless, civil servants, including teachers and doctors, saw their pay shrivel until there was no point in working. Now, though many—perhaps most—Zimbabweans are still on the breadline and 80% have no jobs, at least those in work can predict their income. Inflation is officially running at 5% a year. After years of contraction, the economy is growing—at 8.1% this year, says the finance minister, Tendai Biti, an MDC man.

Health care and education have improved markedly, from rock-bottom. Hospitals that had run out of the most basic medicines, as well as staff, have begun to function again. More recently more than 13m textbooks, paid for by Western donors, have started to be delivered under the eye of Unicef to all the country's 5,600-odd primary schools.

Sales of beer and beverages are sharply up on a year ago. Other indicators, such as sales of roofing material, point to busier economic activity. Traffic in downtown Harare is a lot more clogged than a couple of years ago—and not just because many of the traffic lights are still not working.

The decline in some types of farming may have bottomed out. Tobacco production, for instance, which peaked at around 230m kg in 2000, just as the mass expropriation of white farms got going, slumped to around 59m kg last year. But this year's sales suggest that output, thanks in part to a rise in smallholder planting, may have risen to around 120m kg (though that figure may include smuggled imports). Some minerals are also beginning to do better again, notably gold and platinum. And though the ruling party and its military backers plainly hope to filch the diamonds from newly developed fields in the Marange area, Mr Biti is determined to ensure that the Treasury also benefits.

With recovery, the proportion of Zimbabweans needing food handouts has dropped sharply. Two years ago the UN's World Food Programme found that at least half the country's 8m-9m people relied on them. This year probably only 15% of rural folk will do so.

Breadbasket no more

But the economy as a whole is still in dire straits. Driving for 140km (87 miles) along the main arterial road eastwards from Harare, you pass mile after mile of derelict and seemingly empty farmland that was once among the most productive in Africa. Not a single pedigree cow is to be seen—nor, for that matter, one white face. Grass along many of the verges has been burnt, apparently because hungry people have been trying to flush out rodents for food. Milk production, though well up on last year's figure, is seven times smaller than it was. Beef production has fallen nearly fourfold. You see the same desolate picture across the country, once the region's breadbasket as well as one of the world's largest producers of top-quality tobacco.

Of the 4,500 white farmers who owned 6,800 farms, barely 150 still hold their original tracts, according to John Worsley-Worswick, who runs Justice for Agriculture, a lobby that stands up for commercial farmers and their employees. Another 200 or so have stayed on at least a portion of their land, often as managers or leaseholders. (At least 75% of the country's white farmers, he notes, bought their land on the open market after independence in 1980, having acquired certificates to show that neither the government nor black Zimbabweans wished or were able to buy it.) The invasions are still going on, despite the GPA's assurance that they would stop, with white farmers still subjected to assault and arson as the police look on. Around 278,000 whites once lived in Zimbabwe; now, at a guess, there are around 12,000.

A large majority of the 350,000 permanent black workers and 270,000 seasonal ones who worked on white farms, with at least 1.5m dependants between them, have lost their livelihoods as a result of the expropriations. Most of them were denied land elsewhere in the communally owned rural areas (formerly known as “tribal trust lands”) because they or their forebears came from poorer neighbouring countries, such as Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Fewer than 2% of them have benefited from the confiscations. Thousands have been reduced to living in shacks on the edge of towns. Many were among the 700,000 victims of Operation Murambatsvina, when Zanu-PF decided to sweep away entire shanty-towns in 2005.

The exodus of Zimbabweans abroad, especially to South Africa, has yet to be stemmed, though nearly 420,000 people have been helped to return this year. Figures are disputed, but economic chaos and political repression may have caused a good 3m Zimbabweans to emigrate. The UN's refugee agency counted 149,000 of them applying for political asylum in South Africa last year alone, quite apart from the much larger number who have slipped over the border for work and melted into the population.

Despite the country's surge in economic activity, a drastic decline in manufacturing will be hard to reverse, as cheap Chinese goods flood the local market. Mr Mugabe's law on “indigenisation and economic empowerment”, enacted in 2007 but due for implementation only this year, has deterred all but the boldest firms, at home and abroad, from investing.

The aim of the law is to ensure that all businesses worth more than $500,000 should be majority-owned by black Zimbabweans. The definition of “indigenous” rules out native-born whites—and, for that matter, rich black South Africans, though Zanu-PF is always liable to make exceptions for people who pay enough. Mr Mugabe and his allies are candidly racist in espousing the bill, which they promote as complementary to the land-confiscation policy: large-scale property as well as land should belong only to blacks, however liberal individual whites may have been during the struggle for independence.

The human-rights picture is less horrible than it was two years ago, when Zanu-PF conducted a reign of terror, particularly in the countryside, in response to the MDC's election victory. And that itself came only a year after thugs presumed to be operating under the aegis of Zanu-PF nearly killed Mr Tsvangirai, breaking his skull, and, in a separate incident in prison, beating him to a pulp, before he was charged with treason, a capital offence. (The mutilated body of Edward Chikomba, the cameraman who conveyed the picture of Mr Tsvangirai's battered head to the wider world, was found by the roadside outside Harare, the capital, two weeks later.) Thousands of villagers who were thought to have voted for the MDC were displaced, their houses often burned down. Hundreds were killed.

Short sleeves, long sleeves

But though violence on such a scale has ended for the moment, fear is growing again, partly because Zanu-PF senses that another election may be in the offing. In the past few months a Constitutional Parliamentary Committee, known as COPAC, has been sending “outreach teams” around the country, in theory to discuss a new constitution that is supposed to be drafted in parliament, then endorsed in a referendum. More than a thousand meetings have been held. Many have been peaceful, but Zanu-PF thugs, in an exercise known as Operation Chimumumu (“dumb person”), have been beating up and in a few cases killing suspected MDC supporters who disagree with a so-called Kariba draft favoured by Mr Mugabe. It would, among other things, allow the old man in theory another ten years in office.

“We don't have short sleeves, long sleeves any more,” says an opposition leader near Macheke, east of Harare, referring to the way the Zanu-PF thugs treated those suspected of voting for the MDC: “short sleeves” meant that their arms were axed above the elbow, “long sleeves” at the wrist. “But the fear is growing.” “All that our people want is food and peace,” says a worried priest in a rural area north-east of Harare. “But these [Zanu-PF] guys are starting to come back.” A queasy feeling persists that, while the violence is mostly low-key and confined to the countryside, it could erupt in the run-up to another election. Jabulani Sibanda, a leader of the so-called “vets”, most of whom are far too young to have been true veterans of the guerrilla war against Iain Smith in the 1970s, has recently been terrorising villagers suspected of MDC sympathies in parts of central Zimbabwe.

Although the terror of mid-2008 subsided once it was clear that Mr Mugabe was still pretty much in charge, many leading human-rights campaigners have fled the country: Jestina Mukoko, abducted in late 2008 and held in secret for several months; Noel Kututwa, director of the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, whose band of 8,000-odd brave volunteer monitors prevented Zanu-PF from wholesale ballot-stuffing at the polling stations; Gertrude Hambira of the farm workers' union; and, most recently, Roy Bennett, the MDC's white treasurer and deputy agriculture minister-designate, re-elected as an MP in a landslide in an entirely black constituency, whom, for that very reason, Mr Mugabe still refuses to appoint. After Mr Bennett's eventual acquittal this year on a trumped-up charge of terrorism, for which he spent months in prison, the police say they want to interrogate him on new unspecified charges; he is in hiding abroad.

Tsvangirai's travails

The political picture is patchier still. Plainly, Mr Mugabe has abided only by those parts of the GPA that suit him. A few advances can, however, be chalked up. Commissions on the media, human rights and elections have been set up under decent chairmen. The media has more space, with new licences approved for eight publications, including NewsDay, which offers a far more rounded picture than the Zanu-PF-controlled Herald. The Daily News, by far Zimbabwe's best newspaper until its presses were blown up in 2001, may revive soon. The very fact that Mr Tsvangirai and Mr Mugabe sit down together in cabinet every Monday, apparently without rancour, marks a dramatic turnaround.

But on a range of issues Mr Mugabe ensures that his prime minister is often kept out of the loop, in blatant defiance of the GPA. He has refused, among many other things, to remove the central-bank governor, Gideon Gono, or the attorney-general, Johannes Tomana, both leading authors of the country's economic and human-rights disasters. Above all, he has kept his hands tightly on the levers of hard power: the courts, still largely in the hands of Zanu-PF judges, and in particular the army, the police and the feared Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). By various means, including dirty tricks, deaths and suspensions, the MDC's wafer-thin majority in the lower house has been whittled away, though it technically still has control if the unreliable Mr Mutambara's small slice of the party votes with the main bit.

Owing partly to the MDC's own lack of guile, the country's three most repressive laws, the Public Order and Security Act (known as POSA), the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) and the Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act, are still in force. The sole broadcaster is still under Mr Mugabe's thumb—and full of hate-speak. Even when some of his closest aides and MPs have been arrested or accused on spurious charges, Mr Tsvangirai has been unable to prevent the police or CIO from obeying Zanu-PF's orders to hamstring his party, disperse meetings and beat up its members.

Yet he remains incorrigibly hopeful, refusing to criticise Mr Mugabe even for his patent foot-dragging and abuse of the terms of the GPA, which states that the security forces and courts should be politically neutral. “He's an old man who wants to let go,” he says of the president. “He's looking for an exit strategy that restores his legacy in Zimbabwe and the world.”

Mr Tsvangirai has been accused of weakness and dithering by some of his supporters, who want him to express the people's outrage more forcibly. Even on such core issues as the land confiscations and the indigenisation act, he sounds emollient. “We can't reverse the land reform,” he says. “But there should be a one-family-one-farm policy” and “we must provide for compensation [for the white farmers] as a matter of principle.” “We have modified the [indigenisation] law,” he says, without demanding its removal. New “sectoral thresholds” must be laid down, so that in some parts of the economy, for instance in mining, maybe only 5% of the company would have to be allocated to black Zimbabweans—“on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis, at proper value”. This is a far cry from Mr Mugabe's ferocious insistence on 51% of all mid-sized companies and all land going willy-nilly to blacks. But it does not signify flat-out opposition to drastic, race-based redistribution.

The whites have lost everything—and so has she

Mr Tsvangirai's apparent aim, rather than demanding in vain that the GPA's terms be met, is to entrench his MDC in government and prepare the road towards a fresh round of elections by the end of next year. That involves preparing a new voter roll and ensuring that, for a change, the election is properly monitored. In the past, the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an influential 15-country regional club which South Africa unofficially leads, has whitewashed flawed polls in Mr Mugabe's favour. Now, thinks Mr Tsvangirai, SADC and South Africa, especially its current president, Jacob Zuma, having accepted him as a legitimate prime minister rather than an upstart or a traitor, are likely to give him a fairer wind.

Mr Tsvangirai also calls for the lifting of the personal sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States and a few other countries against Mr Mugabe and 200 or so of his closest colleagues, who blame these measures entirely for Zimbabwe's misfortunes. But in return the president must, he says, guarantee that the coming election will be conducted fairly.

Is this mere wishful thinking? Mr Tsvangirai, noting that against the odds the MDC still managed to win the previous general election, evidently thinks he can pull off the feat more decisively next time. He has also let it be known that he would, if given the chance, form a government of all the talents, including the less venal members of Zanu-PF. He has promised not to impose a policy of retribution.

He even thinks he can accommodate the “securocrats”, as Zimbabwe's high-ranking military people and police are known, who have become ever more powerful and rich (from the proceeds of diamonds, among other things) since the sullied election of 2008, and who are now considered Zanu-PF's most important constituency. Undoubtedly, the security people are jockeying behind the scenes as the succession draws near. These men with guns probably think they can keep Mr Tsvangirai out of power altogether—and for good. But the prime minister is a survivor, and may be cannier than he looks.