Nearly five weeks after Zimbabweans went to the polls in order to choose their next president, there is a result. The figures, which give the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai 47.9%, ahead of President Robert Mugabe's 42.3%, mean that under the law there must now be a run-off. Tsvangirai and his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) must face with a tough choice: whether or not to take part.

It appears that Zimbabwe's opposition leader has already decided whether he will participate in a presidential runoff, but does not want to make his choice public until electoral officials set an election date, the International Herald Tribune reports.

“We have a decision,” Tsvangirai's spokesman George Sibotshiwe told The Associated Press Monday. “But we will only announce it when [the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission] announces the date of the election,” he added.

Morgan Tsvangirai claimed he won outright on March 29 and party officials called as fraudulent Friday's official announcement that he got the most votes, but not enough to avoid a second round.

Tsvangirai's party and independent rights groups blamed Mugabe of having delayed the official results while his army and party militants mounted a campaign of violence and intimidation intended to undermine support for the opposition before any runoff.

The 84-year-old President Mugabe ruled uninterrupted since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Currently, the former British colony is dealing with the world’s highest rate of inflation and an unemployment level that reached the 80 percent mark. Mugabe accused the European Union (E.U.) for his country’s economic collapse.