JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Partial results in South Africa’s national elections The long-ruling African National Congress party is set to fall well short of 50% of the vote as counting continued on Thursday, and it could be on the verge of losing its majority for the first time since it took office under Nelson Mandela power came at the end of apartheid in the country. 1994.
That would be a momentous change for South Africa, where the ANC has been dominant for three decades of its young democracy and is the only ruling party that many have known.
The ANC somehow had the most votes and, as expected, was far ahead in the early results. But if the country fails to win a majority, it may have to form a coalition to remain in government – something that has never happened before in post-apartheid South Africa. Without a majority, the ANC would also need help from other parties to re-elect President Cyril Ramaphosa for a second term.
“I think we are seeing a huge change in South African politics,” Susan Booysen, political analyst and professor emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, said on national broadcaster SABC TV.
With about 27% of votes counted, this was just an early picture after Wednesday’s election. Final results were expected to take days, with the Independent Electoral Commission saying they would be announced on Sunday, although they could come sooner.
South Africans were waiting with bated breath to see if their country, Africa, would be most advanced economy, was about to enter a new era. Some analysts said the incomplete results were already unprecedented in terms of the extent the long dominant ANC was below the 50% limit at this stage of the count.
The results announced came from just over 6,000 of the more than 23,000 polling stations across South Africa’s nine provinces, and there was still a long way to go in the count. The partial results gave the ANC 43% of the vote.
The ANC’s worst performance in a national election is the 57.5% it won in the last election of 2019. A government agency and SABC projection, based on early voting results, estimated the ANC would win around 42% this time Hatch. a drop of more than 15%, which would be a stunning result in the context of South Africa.
If predictions hold, the ANC would likely have to co-govern and find a coalition partner, leaving South Africa in the unknown. The ANC said until Wednesday’s election that it was confident of retaining its majority and has given no indication of how it might form a coalition government.
South Africa has had to “chart a new direction, but without a clear indication of what direction that is likely to be,” said Terry Tselane, executive chairman of the Institute of Election Management Services in Africa, an electoral think tank. He called it a defining moment.
This election was seen as a direct referendum on the country’s unbroken rule the ANCwhich liberated South Africa from the oppressive, racist apartheid regime in the famous all-race vote of 1994, but has seen its popularity steadily decline over the past two decades.
ANC deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane said on SABC: “We remain optimistic.”
In a separate interview, she said the ANC found the initial results better than some had expected.
“Everyone was looking at the ANC (to receive) from about 36% to 40%, and we are pretty confident we will surpass that,” Mokonyane said.
Nearly 28 million people of South Africa’s 62 million population were registered to vote.
South Africa may be the continent’s most advanced country, but it has struggled to solve massive inequality that has kept millions of people in poverty for decades after apartheid segregation ended. That inequality and widespread poverty disproportionately affects the black majority, which makes up more than 80% of the country’s population. South Africa has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world at 32%.
Voters repeatedly cited unemployment and other issues such as ANC corruption scandals, problems with basic government services and high violent crime rates as their main grievances.
The ANC faced more opposition than ever in this vote. There were over fifty political parties registered to participate, most of them in national elections, many of which were new. A large part of the opposition votes However, it was expected to be spread to a range of those other parties.
The early results put the Democratic Alliance at about 25% of the vote and the Economic Freedom Fighters party at about 8%. They are the largest opposition parties in South Africa. The partial results also reflected the potential immediate impact of former President Jacob Zuma’s new MK party, which turned against the ANC he once led. The MK Party had the fourth largest share of the first elections and became a major factor in the drain of support from the ANC.
South Africans vote for parties in national elections and not directly for their president. Those parties are then given seats in parliament based on their share of the vote, and lawmakers choose the president. The ANC has always had a clear parliamentary majority since 1994, so the president has always come from the ANC.
That process of electing a president would not be so simple if the ANC lost its majority.
The Electoral Commission predicted a high turnout and that was reflected in scenes across the country on Wednesday as South Africans queued late into the night to make their choice. The long, winding lines of voters in cities, towns and countryside revived memories of the final 1994 elections that changed a country.
While polling stations officially closed at 9 p.m., voting continued for hours in many places afterward as officials noticed a late surge of ballots being cast in major cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town. The electoral commission said the last votes were cast around 3am. The rules say that anyone who lines up at a polling station before closing time should be allowed to vote.
The determination of South Africans who rose late into the night in the cold winter weather suggested that millions of people had embraced how important this election could be.
“I would certainly argue that we are looking at a moment of change,” says Joleen Steyn-Kotze, principal research specialist on democracy at the Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa.
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Gerald Imray reported from Cape Town.
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