06/11/2025
Denial and Defeat: The MCP’s Mirror Moment
When the 2025 election results were announced, shock rippled through the Malawi Congress Party (MCP). Many couldn’t believe it. Some claimed the vote was rigged. Others blamed an ungrateful electorate. A few even called it a divine test.
But behind all those explanations lay something simple—and painfully human: denial.
Denial isn’t an MCP problem; it’s a human instinct. Psychologists say it’s a defense mechanism—the mind’s way of shielding itself when truth hurts too much. In politics, though, denial is a slow poison. It blinds leaders from seeing what voters are actually saying.
Think of the voter as a mirror. After the 2025 loss, the MCP looked into that mirror and didn’t like the reflection. Instead of adjusting the image, it blamed the mirror.
Across the world, losing parties often look for villains. In Malawi, the blame list was long—MEC, foreign influence, social media lies, even bad luck. But none of those caused the fuel shortages, rising maize prices, or joblessness people endured for months before voting.
Voters didn’t need propaganda to see hardship—they were living it.
Political scientists call it retrospective voting: people judge governments by how life has been under their watch. When the economy hurts, the ruling party pays. Elections are not won by slogans, songs, or rallies—they’re won by who makes life bearable.
So when the MCP called voters ungrateful, it missed the point. The people didn’t imagine their suffering; they experienced it daily. Denying that truth was like arguing with hunger.
The meme about the bee and the fly sums it up well: the bee loves pollen; the fly loves filth. No matter how much the bee explains why pollen is better, the fly won’t change—it’s too used to its taste.
After 2025, the MCP became the fly—buzzing around excuses instead of seeking new ideas, new strategies, and new connections with voters.
Meanwhile, Malawians moved on. They were done with sermons and slogans. They wanted results. Humility without delivery sounded like silence dressed in holiness.
Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance—the discomfort when beliefs clash with reality. To escape that tension, people twist facts to protect their image.
That’s exactly what happened in the MCP. The party saw itself as the nation’s moral compass—the saviour of the 2020 “Tippex” crisis. So when defeat came, it didn’t fit the self-image. Instead of asking, “What went wrong?”, many asked, “Who betrayed us?”
This led to collective narcissism—a pride that turns every criticism into an insult. It’s the belief that “we are too good to fail, so someone else must be to blame.” That posture feels righteous but traps a party in its own myth.
The consequences are now visible. Instead of regrouping, the MCP turned inward. Members attack each other online. Critics are branded infiltrators. Factions multiply. Energy that should go to rebuilding is being wasted on revenge.
The grassroots—the foot soldiers who kept the party alive during opposition—feel abandoned. Many believe the leadership surrounded itself with technocrats and clergy disconnected from reality. Whether true or not, perception matters. When your base feels ignored, rebuilding trust becomes ten times harder.
This is how denial turns defeat into decay. It feeds on excuses until no one believes them anymore.
To recover, the MCP must do something both painful and liberating: accept the truth. The loss wasn’t a theft; it was a verdict. And that verdict said: “Our patience ran out.”
Once that truth is faced, healing can begin. The first step is to reconnect with the people—not through press statements but through listening. Go to the markets, depots, minibus ranks. Ask people what changed since 2020. Many of those who voted against the MCP were loyal supporters who simply couldn’t afford life anymore. That’s the real campaign feedback.
The next step is humility. Stop preaching morality and start delivering results. Voters don’t reward purity—they reward progress. A bag of affordable maize speaks louder than a thousand manifestos.
History shows that parties can rise again—but only if they learn. After defeat, Britain’s Labour Party reformed. Ghana’s NDC rebranded. They didn’t curse the referee; they studied why people stopped listening.
The MCP can do the same. The 2025 loss revealed fixable weaknesses: poor communication, overreliance on outsiders, weak structures, and overconfidence in incumbency. These aren’t sins; they’re symptoms.
Instead of silencing criticism, the party should institutionalize it. Form an independent review team of veterans and young thinkers to dissect what went wrong. Honest introspection is painful, but denial is fatal.
Ironically, the same trap now awaits the DPP. Winning power is one thing; governing amid economic struggle is another. If the DPP fails to stabilize fuel, maize, and forex, the same retrospective logic that punished the MCP will soon turn on them.
That’s where the MCP’s second chance lies. Voters don’t stay loyal to misery—they stay loyal to improvement. If the DPP fails to deliver real relief, the people will look again—for whoever can fix what’s broken.
When that moment comes, the MCP must be ready: reformed, humble, data-driven, and solution-oriented. The era of emotional politics is over. Malawians want bread, fuel, and jobs. Whoever delivers those wins.
Denial may comfort the heart, but it poisons the future. It keeps a party defending its past while the world moves forward.
The MCP’s challenge is not to win back votes—it’s to win back credibility. That begins with honesty.
Losing an election doesn’t make a party weak. Refusing to learn from it does.
If the MCP can look into the mirror without excuses, it might rediscover the discipline and focus that once made it great. And if the DPP repeats the same mistakes, the cycle of accountability will tilt again.
In Malawi, voters may forgive slowly—but they punish consistently.
In 2025, the people spoke. The question now is: Will the MCP listen or argue?
Because no matter how much the fly explains its love for filth, the bee will always return to the flowers.
And if the DPP cannot grow those flowers, the field will open again—for a wiser, humbler MCP that finally understands what the voters were saying all along.
The time to listen and rebuild is now.
