By MakanDay Editor
Zambia’s presidential election has once again exposed the sharp regional voting patterns that have long defined the country’s politics, with the final results pointing to political loyalties associated not simply with where voters live, but with the regions from which they originate.
President Hakainde Hichilema of the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND) won the election with about 2.97 million votes, against 1.86 million for Brian Mundubile of the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Progress (NRPUP). But the provincial breakdown tells a deeper story about Zambia’s political geography.
Hichilema, a southerner, overwhelmingly dominated Southern, Western and North-Western provinces.
Mundubile from the north, meanwhile, carried Eastern, Luapula, Muchinga and Northern provinces. His performance in those areas also needs to be understood in the context of his political history.
The former ruling Patriotic Front (PF) did not field a presidential candidate after years of internal leadership disputes, legal battles and alleged interference by the ruling party following its 2021 defeat. But much of its political machinery and support gravitated towards Mundubile, himself a former senior PF figure.
This makes his strong showing in former PF strongholds particularly significant: although the PF name was absent from the presidential ballot, its political footprint was not.
The results suggest that the PF’s organisational networks and its old electoral base remained an important force in the 2026 contest even without a PF presidential candidate on the ballot.
In Luapula, Mundubile received about 235,000 votes, compared with Hichilema’s 100,000. He won Northern Province with about 230,000 votes against Hichilema’s 127,000, and Muchinga with about 143,000 against 63,000.
Mundubile also carried Eastern Province, receiving about 350,000 votes against Hichilema’s 188,000.
But the scale of regional voting is most striking when those figures are compared with Hichilema’s strongest areas.
In Southern Province, Hichilema received about 719,000 votes, while Mundubile managed just 26,000.
Western Province gave Hichilema about 437,000 votes against Mundubile’s 12,000, while in North-Western Province Hichilema received about 388,000 against 15,000.
Those enormous differences demonstrate why looking only at the national totals can obscure one of the most important features of Zambia’s elections.
The country votes for a president nationally, but the votes that produce that national result continue to be accumulated from sharply differentiated regional blocs.
Copperbelt tells a different story
The Copperbelt, however, produced an extraordinarily close contest.
Both Hichilema and Mundubile received about 370,000 votes, with fewer than 2,000 votes separating them.
That result is especially significant because the Copperbelt is both a former PF stronghold and one of Zambia’s biggest centres of internal migration.
People from different parts of Zambia have settled on the Copperbelt over generations. The province’s nearly even division therefore raises a question that provincial totals alone cannot answer: to what extent does its vote reflect political preferences associated with the regions of origin of the people who now live there?
Lusaka presents a similar question.
Mundubile received about 335,000 votes in Lusaka Province against Hichilema’s 316,000, a difference of roughly 19,000 votes.
Like the Copperbelt, Lusaka contains large populations whose family and regional origins lie elsewhere in Zambia.
This matters when interpreting the election.
A vote cast in Lusaka does not necessarily represent a distinctively Lusaka political identity, just as a vote cast in Kitwe, Ndola or Chingola does not necessarily tell us where that voter originates.
Provincial results cannot establish the regional identity of individual voters. But the broader electoral pattern provides a compelling reason to examine the relationship between regional origin, political affiliation and voting behaviour.
Hichilema also carried Central Province, receiving about 259,000 votes against Mundubile’s 139,000.
What emerges from the final results is therefore more than another Hichilema victory.
The 2026 election has again demonstrated the durability of Zambia’s regional political divide, even as people migrate across the country and political parties change, fragment and form new alliances.
Mundubile’s ability to draw on PF structures and perform strongly in several former PF strongholds demonstrates that political organisations still matter. But the extraordinary margins elsewhere suggest something deeper and more enduring.
Zambians may leave the regions from which they originate and build their lives elsewhere, but for many, regional political attachments appear to travel with them.
The 2026 result also demonstrates how difficult it remains for Zambia’s political parties to build support evenly across the country. Winning the presidency can depend less on commanding similar levels of support everywhere than on accumulating overwhelming majorities in particular regions while remaining competitive elsewhere.
Hichilema’s huge margins in Southern, Western and North-Western provinces gave him an advantage that Mundubile’s victories in the north and east could not overcome.
The challenge presented by the 2026 results is therefore not merely which party can assemble enough regional blocs to win the next election. It is whether Zambia’s politics can eventually produce a genuinely national electoral constituency in which a candidate’s regional identity — and the regional origins of voters — become less powerful predictors of the ballot.
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