Results could still vary slightly as votes from major metropolitan areas continue to come in. The final count is expected on Saturday.
The white-led Liberal Democratic Alliance received just under 23 percent of the vote, suggesting that gaffes by the party’s leaders have hurt its promotion as a party of good governance. DA leader John Steenhuisen, whose party appears set to retain the Western Cape around Cape Town, said the result was “a great day for democracy”.
“People have now chosen to punish a government that has failed to keep its promises by removing its majority,” he said. “The waters are choppy, but for the first time in 30 years, no party has a majority. As a Democrat, this delights me from head to toe.
The actual winner of the election, in third place with 12 percent of the vote, was the new party uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) – meaning “Spear of the Nation” – which was founded last year to serve as vehicle to former president Jacob Zuma, once an ANC loyalist.
Although Zuma leads the MK Party, a court disqualified him from serving in Parliament after he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court in 2021. The constitution prohibits anyone sentenced to a prison term of 12 months or no longer occupy a parliamentary seat. .
MK is named after the military wing of the ANC during the apartheid years and represents the Zulu tribal faction of the ANC. Zuma, who is Zulu, led the ANC as president from 2009 until corruption allegations forced him to resign in 2018. Ramaphosa succeeded him and relations between the two men are acrimonious.
Political analyst and author Mpumelelo Mkhabela said there appeared to be an internal battle over who should lead the MK party: Zuma or its founder Jabulani Khumalo.
“It is a party which has no culture of leadership, of elective conference. They have no decision-making culture – it’s all about Jacob Zuma’s personality,” Mkhabela said. It remains unclear whether this cult of personality could enable effective decision-making, he said.
MK’s strong performance came “from an angle we didn’t really expect”, Gwede Mantashe, the ANC national chairman, told media on Thursday. “This was the biggest surprise of these elections.”
The populist Economic Freedom Fighters party, whose supporters often wear red berets and advocate forced nationalization of white-owned mines and farms, came in fourth with 9.5 percent of the vote. Its founder, Julius Malema, was head of the ANC Youth League before splitting in 2011.
The national electoral commission says turnout was almost 60 percent, or just under two-thirds, in the 2019 elections, when the ANC received 57 percent of the vote, its worst previous performance.
The ANC’s inability to eradicate endemic corruption within its ranks, or to tackle high unemployment, violent crime and deteriorating services, including chronic power outages, has sharply eroded its support, which is in steady decline for years.
Any of the major parties could push the ANC past the 50 percent mark, but all will likely demand substantial concessions.
“They cannot have political continuity,” said Pauline Bax, deputy director of the Africa program at the International Crisis Group. At the national level, a partnership with the DA could mean a shift to the right on economic policy, and a partnership with MK or the EFF would likely require a shift to the left.
Internationally, the DA is the more pro-Western partner, she said, and MK or the EFF would likely welcome strengthening the already friendly ties between the ANC and Russia. Moscow was a key ally during the ANC’s liberation struggle.
“The Democratic Alliance is much more pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine,” Bax said. “But the question is whether foreign policy is the most important thing to the DA.”
MK and the EFF want to nationalize mines and land, she pointed out, which would likely disrupt trade relations with investors and the United States. South Africa is the United States’ largest trading partner in Africa.
“There are allegations that Zuma took money from pro-Russian sources,” she said, and one of her daughters was also an early promoter of the #IStandWithPutin movement. online campaign, according to the Center for Information Resilience. Bloomberg News reported last month that Russian accounts were amplifying Zuma’s campaign.
South Africa is leading the global condemnation of Israel’s war in Gaza by leading the case against it at the International Criminal Court, but this is unlikely to be affected by the elections.
washingtonpost
