The African National Congress lost its political monopoly in South Africa after Saturday’s election results showed that with almost all votes counted, the party received only about 40 percent, falling short of winning an absolute majority for the first time since the last African defeat. a white-led regime 30 years ago.
With South Africans facing one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, electricity and water shortages and rampant crime, the ruling party is still beating its rivals, but with less than the nearly 58 percent of votes it won in the last election, in 2019.
Africa’s oldest liberation movement has put one of the continent’s most stable countries and largest economies on an uneasy and uncertain path.
The party, which gained international acclaim on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela, will now have two weeks to consolidate its government by cooperating with one or more rival parties that it has denounced as corrupt and vowed not to form an alliance with them.
“I was really surprised,” said Maropene Ramokgopa, one of the top officials of the African National Congress, or ANC.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who leads the ANC, faces serious threats to his ambitions to serve a second term. He will be forced to call upon the negotiation skills he famously helped broker in the end of apartheid, and to pull together a factionalized party that may not agree with the party it will ally with.
Detractors are expected to lay the blame for this tumble and have a major impact on Mr. Ramaphosa’s feet and may try to replace him, possibly with his representative, Paul Mashatile. Previously, the largest drop from one party to the next election was 4.7 percent, in 2019.
“I don’t expect Ramaphosa, in five years, to make the situation worse than he found it,” said Khulu Mbatha, an ANC veteran who has criticized the party for not tackling corruption aggressively enough.
A big factor in the downfall of the ANC was Jacob Zuma, Mr Ramaphosa’s arch-rival and previous president and leader of the ANC.
Just six months ago, Mr Zuma helped launch a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, which was the name of the armed wing of the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. The party won nearly 15 percent of the vote, an unprecedented result for a new party in a national election. This stifled important voices from the ANC and other parties.
Despite the surprising results, Mr. Zuma – a scandal-plagued populist who thrives on grievance politics – discredited the election, saying the party had actually received two-thirds of the vote, but the results were rigged. Party officials said they had given evidence to the election commission. But Mr Zuma, who leads the party despite being barred from joining Parliament, has not revealed the evidence. He warned the commission not to certify the election results on Sunday as scheduled.
“There is nothing to announce tomorrow,” he said during a press conference at his headquarters in Johannesburg, where election officials released the results. “If that happens, people will provoke us. I hope whoever is responsible listens to what we have to say. Don’t start trouble, when there is no problem.
Representatives from about two dozen other smaller parties also claimed irregularities in the election joined Mr. Zuma in the call to delay the announcement of the official results.
Mr Zuma’s actions reflect the political challenges the ANC could face
Without an absolute majority, the ANC can no longer elect a president, who is elected by the 400-member National Assembly. There are 52 parties in national elections, and the number of seats a party receives in the Assembly is based on the percentage of votes it wins.
“South Africa is going to have teething problems as it enters this era,” said Pranish Desai, a data analyst with Good Governance Africa, a nonpartisan organization. “Some may be important, but the voters decided they wanted this.”
Because of the wide gap to reach 50 percent, the ANC will likely try to ally with some of the big parties that traded bitter barbs with during the campaign.
This predicament upends the political landscape of South Africa and places the ANC at an inflection point. These potential coalition partners run the ideological gamut, and the party can alienate its constituent parts depending on who it chooses as a partner.
The big question is whether the ANC will embrace or shun Mr Zuma, who stepped down as president in 2018 amid corruption allegations.
ANC leaders could reject one of Mr Zuma’s basic demands for coalition agreement. Duduzile Zuma, daughter of the former president, said her father’s party would not partner with the “ANC of Ramaphosa.”
Another potential ally for the ANC is the Democratic Alliance, which got the second largest vote, with almost 22 percent. Some ANC members have accused the Democratic Alliance of promoting policies that will actually bring the country back to apartheid. Others see the partnership between the two parties as a natural fit because the Democratic Alliance’s market-based view of the economy aligns closely with Mr. Ramaphosa’s.
But entering this grand coalition could prove a risky policy for Mr. Ramaphosa because the Democratic Alliance has staunchly opposed policies based on race intended to increase employment and wealth of Blacks. It has also pushed issues that appeal to the right-wing white population.
The ANC may look to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party started ten years ago by one of the expelled ANC youth leaders, Julius Malema. Mr Malema’s party fell short of expectations, winning less than 10 per cent of the vote after getting nearly 11 per cent last time.
“We want to work with the ANC,” an unassuming Mr Malema said at a news conference on Friday, adding that the ruling party would be more likely to stomach a heavy electoral slide. “The ANC, if compromised, is not arrogant.”
Analysts said that such a partnership could spook big business and international investors because of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ insistence on the nationalization of mines and other businesses, and taking land from white owners to be distributed to Black South Africans. But large sections of the ANC are ideologically aligned with the Economic Freedom Fighters’ philosophy of wealth redistribution.
There are fears that the country is headed for political chaos that will divert the focus from many problems. Coalition government at the local level has proven unstable, with leadership changing so haphazardly and so bitterly that MPs fail to get anything done for their constituents.
For many South Africans whose ongoing hardships make them question whether they have truly been freed from apartheid, this unprecedented moment is an opportunity to reset in parallel with the transition to democracy generations ago.
During the election, the slogan “2024 is our 1994” spread on social media and on campaign posters, especially among young South Africans.
The watershed elections ended the dominance of the party that led the fight against colonialism, which shaped Africa in the second half of the 20th century. who grew up under apartheid loyal to the party.
But that loyalty is lost because many South Africans cannot see the material conditions that have grown during the decades of the ANC’s leadership – while many of the party’s leaders have amassed wealth. Younger South Africans who do not live under white government are already part of a large electorate, and tend to be less interested in party aura than performance in government.
The results of the provincial legislative elections provide the most striking picture yet of the ANC’s decline. It fell by nearly 40 percentage points in Mr. Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal, 20 points in Mpumalanga, one of its strongholds and 15 points in Gauteng, the most populous province including Johannesburg.
Several neighboring countries in southern Africa are governed by former liberation movements that are close allies of the ANC, and have also seen a drop in electoral support. South Africa’s election results could foreshadow the fallout, analysts say.
Mavuso Msimang, a veteran ANC member, said he could feel his party’s demise as he drove through long lines outside polling stations on Election Day. He worries that the party will be punished for failing to deliver basic services, such as electricity.
“I said to myself, ‘You know, these people are not queuing up to vote to thank the ANC for taking the lamp,'” he said. “It’s clear that these people are not going to vote for us.”
