South Africa’s governing party, the historic African National Congress (ANC), won the general elections, but lost the absolute majority with which it has governed since Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994. This is what the first results published in this report indicate. Thursday by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).
With the count still at 13.45% of the total, the downward trend predicted by pre-election polls continues and the ANC now appears with 42.49% of the votes, which is why the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, would have to close agreements with other parties to obtain a second five-year term.
Although results have worsened in each election since 2004 for the ANC, in the 2019 general elections the party managed to maintain a comfortable majority of 57.5%. Now, if the trend continues, the party will lose around 15 percentage points.
It would be the first time that the ANC had not obtained an absolute majority since the first multiracial elections in South Africa, following the end of the segregationist apartheid regime in 1994, when Mandela became the country’s first black president.
In second place in the count is the liberal center-right Democratic Alliance (DA). The party led by John Steenhuisen obtained 26.12% of the votes, greatly improving the result from 2019, when it obtained 20.77%.
The AD is the main opposition party, heir to the white political leadership that opposed the apartheid regime and traditionally associated with the vote of the white minority, which represents 7.70% of the South African population.
Third place is occupied by Julius Malema’s far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), with 8.40%, while in fourth place is uMkhonto weSizwe (MK Party), the new party of former president Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), with 7.75%.
Zuma tried to run in the elections as head of the new political party, but the Constitutional Court prevented him in the middle of the election campaign, as he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt in 2021.
However, the emergence of the MK influenced the division of votes with the ANC, also affected by cases of corruption such as those carried out by Zuma himself and worn down by the problems that afflict the country, such as high unemployment, crime and interruptions in the supply of energy.
Almost 28 million South Africans were able to cast their votes at a total of 23,293 polling stations, of which 3,132 have already been counted, according to the IEC.
South Africans decided between 70 parties and 11 independent candidates to elect the 400 members of the National Assembly (Lower House of Parliament), who in turn must choose the president. Furthermore, the population voted to decide the authorities of the country’s nine provinces.
#South #Africa #Mandelas #party #expected #lose #absolute #majority