AGI – The African National Congress (ANC)the party with which Nelson Mandela became the first president of color of South Africa in 1994 and has governed ever since the country, has won Wednesday’s election but lost his absolute majority for the first time in thirty years, since the end of apartheid. With 99.91% of votes counted, the ANC collapses to 40.2%, more than 17 points less than in the previous elections in 2019, so its South African leader and president, Cyril Ramaphosawill have to agree with the other parties to run for a second five-year term.
It is the first time that the ANC has not achieved an absolute majority, and even though for twenty years the results have worsened election after election and in the 2019 vote it managed to maintain a comfortable majority of 57.5%. To the second place is the Democratic Alliance (AD, center-right liberal) by John Steenhuisen with 21.7% of the votes, which improves the result of 2019, when he obtained 20.77%. The AD is the main opposition party, heir to the white political leadership that opposed apartheid and traditionally associated with the white minority vote, which represents 7.7% of the South African population. There big surprise came from uMkhonto weSizwe (MK Party), the new lineup of former president Jacob Zuma (in office from 2009 to 2018), who stormed into his first general election with 14.6% and took third place from Julius Malema’s EFF, which fell to fourth place with 9.5%.
The Constitutional Court prevented Zuma – sentenced in 2021 to fifteen months in prison for contempt – from running for office, but the controversy does not appear to have reduced support for his party. The appearance of the MK significantly influenced the division of the vote for the ANC, plagued by cases of corruption and the problems plaguing the country, such as high unemployment, crime or electricity cuts. Last Wednesday, almost 28 million South Africans were called to vote and the turnout was 58.61%, below the 66% of 2019.
South Africans have voted among seventy parties and eleven independent candidates for the 400 members ofNational Assembly (Lower House of Parliament), which in turn must choose the president. The authorities of the country’s nine provinces also chose. In at least 24 polling stations the votes were recounted and overall 579 complaints of irregularities were filed. Some complaints are merely instrumental, and have been lodged by political parties such as MK and EFF.
For his part, Zuma criticized the “haste” in announcing the results and called on the electoral commission to be cautious in announcing the outcome of the vote.
