JOHANNESBURG, May 31 (NNN-AGENCIES) — With a third of the votes counted, South Africa’s ruling ANC is on course to win another general election but lose its 30-year-old outright majority, partial results showed Thursday.
According to the Independent Electoral Commission, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress has won 42.19 percent of the votes, with 7,658 districts out of 23,293 reporting.
This would leave it the largest single party in the National Assembly but, crucially, without the absolute majority it has won in every previous national vote since the advent of democracy in 1994.
The ANC has won national elections held every five years since the landmark 1994 election, which marked the end of apartheid and the ascent of Nelson Mandela as president.
But since those heady days the ANC’s support has declined because of disillusionment over issues such as high unemployment and crime, frequent power blackouts and corruption.
Based on the early results, the ANC is projected to have roughly 42% of the vote when the count is over, according to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research which was providing projections to the state broadcaster SABC.
In the previous election in 2019, the ANC won 57.5% of the vote, with 20.8% for the DA and 10.8% for the EFF, on a turnout of 66% of registered voters, which the commission has already said is likely to be higher this time.
Under South Africa’s constitution, the newly elected National Assembly will elect the next president.
With the ANC still on course to be the largest party, its leader Cyril Ramaphosa is likely to remain as the country’s president, although a poor showing could make him vulnerable to a leadership challenge from within party ranks.
The early results showed the ANC on 38%, the DA on 27.8%% and the EFF on 10.9% in the key province of Gauteng, which includes the country’s business capital Johannesburg and the sprawling townships of Soweto and Alexandra.
In KwaZulu-Natal, a populous eastern province where the major city of Durban is located, a new party led by former president Jacob Zuma, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was performing strongly, with 42.7% of the vote versus 21.4% for the ANC.
Zuma was forced to quit as president in 2018 after a string of scandals and has since fallen out with the ANC leadership, leading him to throw his weight behind MK. The party, named after the ANC’s armed wing from the apartheid era, appeared to be costing both the ANC and the EFF votes, especially in KwaZulu-Natal.
By law, the electoral commission has seven days to declare full results, but in practice it is usually faster than that. In the last election, in 2019, voting took place on a Wednesday like this year and final results came on the Saturday. The new parliament must convene within 14 days of final results being declared and its first act must be to elect the nation’s president.
This means that if the ANC is confirmed to have lost its majority there could be two weeks of intense and complex negotiations to agree on how to form a new government. — NNN-AGENCIES
