The African National Congress lost its political monopoly on South Africa after Saturday’s election results showed that with almost all votes counted, the party received only about 40 percent, far from having obtained an absolute majority for the first time since the victory of the last African Congress. white-led regime 30 years ago.
While South Africans face one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, electricity and water shortages and rampant crime, the ruling party has consistently beaten its competitors, but is far from reaching the nearly 58% of the votes he won in the last elections, in 2019.
The precipitous fall of Africa’s oldest liberation movement has placed one of the continent’s most stable countries and its largest economy on a difficult and uncharted path.
The party, which gained international fame thanks to Nelson Mandela, will now have two weeks to form a government by joining forces with one or more rival parties who have called it corrupt and vowed never to form an alliance with him.
“I’m actually shocked,” said Maropene Ramokgopa, a senior official in the African National Congress, or ANC. “It opened our eyes to say, ‘Look, we’re missing something, somewhere.’
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who leads the ANC, faces a serious threat to his ambition to run for a second term. He will be forced to call upon the negotiating skills that helped him end apartheid, and bring together his highly factionalized party, which will likely disagree over which party to ally with.
Critics are expected to lay the blame for this devastating fall at the feet of Mr Ramaphosa and attempt to replace him, possibly with his deputy, Paul Mashatile. Previously, the party’s largest drop from one election to the next was 4.7%, in 2019.
“I didn’t expect Ramaphosa, in five years, to make things worse,” said Khulu Mbatha, an ANC veteran who has criticized the party for not tackling corruption aggressively enough .
A significant factor in the collapse of the ANC was Jacob Zuma, Mr Ramaphosa’s archenemy and predecessor as 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 almost 15 percent of the vote, an unprecedented result for a new party in a national election. He siphoned off crucial votes from the ANC and other parties.
Despite the stunning result, Mr Zuma – a scandal-plagued populist who thrives on grievance politics – discredited the election, saying his party had actually received two-thirds of the vote but that the results were faked. Party officials say they have presented evidence to the electoral commission. But Mr. Zuma, who leads the party despite being barred from sitting in Parliament, has not made this evidence public. He warned the commission not to certify the election results on Sunday as planned.
“No one has to declare tomorrow,” he told a news conference at headquarters in Johannesburg, where election officials were releasing the results. “If that happens, people will provoke us. I hope the manager hears what we are saying. Don’t cause trouble when there isn’t any.”
Representatives of around twenty other small parties, also denouncing irregularities in the election, joined Mr. Zuma in his call for the announcement of official results to be postponed.
Mr Zuma’s actions foreshadow the political challenges he could cause to the ANC
Without an absolute majority, the ANC can no longer choose the president of the country, elected by the 400 members of the National Assembly. There were 52 parties in the national elections and the number of seats parties get in the Assembly is based on the percentage of votes they won.
“South Africa is going to have teething problems as we enter this era,” said Pranish Desai, a data analyst at Good Governance Africa, a nonpartisan organization. “Some of them might be important, but the voters decided they wanted them to be.” »
Because of the wide gap to reach 50 percent, the ANC will likely try to ally itself with some of the larger parties with whom it exchanged bitter barbs during the campaign.
This difficult situation is shaking up the South African political landscape and placing the ANC at an inflection point. Its potential coalition partners run the ideological gamut, and the party could alienate different parts of its base depending on who it chooses as a partner.
A big question is whether the ANC will welcome or reject Mr Zuma, who resigned as president in 2018 over corruption allegations.
ANC leaders could resist one of Mr Zuma’s core demands, a coalition deal. Duduzile Zuma, a daughter of the former president, said her father’s party would not associate with “Ramaphosa’s ANC”.
Another potential ANC ally is the Democratic Alliance, which received the second largest vote share, almost 22 percent. Some ANC members accused the Democratic Alliance of promoting policies that would return the country to apartheid. Others see a partnership between the two parties as a natural fit, as the Democratic Alliance’s market-based vision of the economy closely aligns with that of Mr Ramaphosa.
But entering this grand coalition could prove politically risky for Mr Ramaphosa, as the Democratic Alliance has strongly opposed race-based policies aimed at increasing black employment and wealth. It also raised issues that appealed to the right-wing white population.
The ANC could instead turn to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party founded a decade ago by one of the ANC’s expelled young leaders, Julius Malema. Mr Malema’s party failed to meet expectations, winning less than 10 percent of the vote compared to nearly 11 percent last time.
“We want to work with the ANC,” Mr. Malema said, in an unusually soft voice, at a news conference on Saturday, adding that the ruling party would be easier to support due to its serious electoral fall. . “The ANC, when compromised, is not arrogant.”
Analysts said such a partnership could scare away big business and international investors because of the insistence of economic freedom fighters on nationalizing mines and other businesses and taking land from white owners for redistribution. to black South Africans. But much of the ANC is ideologically aligned with the economic freedom fighters’ philosophy on wealth redistribution.
There are fears that the country is heading towards political chaos that would distract attention from its many problems. Coalition governments at the local level have proven unstable, with leaders changing on a whim and infighting so bitter that lawmakers fail to do anything for their constituents.
For the many South Africans whose ongoing difficulties have left them wondering whether they had truly been liberated from apartheidthis unprecedented moment represented a chance for a reset comparable to the transition to democracy a generation ago.
During the election, the slogan “2024 is our 1994” circulated on social media and on campaign posters, particularly among young South Africans.
These decisive elections ended the dominance of a party that spearheaded the fight against colonialism, which reshaped Africa in the second half of the 20th century. The stories of torture and hardship endured by ANC members helped make many of them heroes in the eyes of South Africa and the world – a reputation that many voters grew up with under apartheid to remain loyal to the party.
But that loyalty has waned as many South Africans have not seen their material conditions improve significantly during the decades of ANC leadership – while many of the party’s leaders have amassed enormous wealth. Young South Africans those who have not lived under white rule have become a growing part of the electorate, and they tend to be less interested in the party’s aura than in its performance in government.
The results of the provincial legislative elections provided the most stark picture of the ANC’s decline. It fell by almost 40 percentage points in Mr. Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal, by 20 points in Mpumalanga, one of his strongholds, and by 15 points in Gauteng, the most population which includes Johannesburg.
Some of the country’s neighbors in southern Africa are governed by former liberation movements that are close allies of the ANC and have also seen their electoral support decline. The outcome of South Africa’s elections could portend their downfall, analysts say.
Mavuso Msimang, a senior ANC member, said he could sense his party’s demise as he walked through the long queues outside polling stations on polling day. He feared the party would be punished for its failure to provide basic services, such as electricity.
“I said to myself, ‘You know, these people aren’t lining up to vote to thank the ANC for turning off the lights,'” he said. “It was clear that these people were not going to vote for us. »
