South Africans reject the ANC
The African National Congress has lost its political monopoly in South Africa. Saturday’s election results showed the party had failed to win an absolute majority for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.
The ANC received around 40 percent of the vote, which was the largest proportion, but a dramatic drop from the almost 58 percent it received in the last election, in 2019. It has cost the ANC, which achieved recognition international on Nelson’s shoulders. Mandela: the majority of him in Parliament, which elects the president, and has two weeks to form a government and elect a president.
Rival parties, however, have ridiculed the ANC as corrupt and have vowed never to form an alliance with it. A big question is whether the ANC would ally itself with Jacob Zuma, its former leader, who resigned as president in 2018 over corruption allegations. A new party he helped found just six months ago won nearly 15 percent of the vote.
The Democratic Alliance had the second largest share, almost 22 percent. It is a potential ally of the ANC, but some ANC members have accused the Democratic Alliance of promoting policies that would essentially take the country back to apartheid. Here’s what could happen next.
Voter Frustrations: South Africans face one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, electricity and water shortages, and rampant crime. Many see the ANC as something of a relic. “Maybe they had a plan to fight apartheid, but not a plan for the economy,” said one voter.
President Cyril Ramaphosa: The ANC leader will have to rally his highly fractured party to form a coalition. Some may blame him for the devastating defeat and look for new leadership in the party.
His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party focused almost entirely on Modi’s popular leadership to overcome growing anti-ruler sentiment. The opposition, despite being paralyzed by arrests and other repressive measures, mustered its most united front in years, but exit polls indicated it was struggling to chip away at the BJP’s sizable parliamentary majority.
Biden pressures Israel for a ceasefire
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has been put on the spot in recent days by President Biden, who called for a truce in Gaza on Friday and outlined broad terms that he said were put forward by Israel. “It’s time for this war to end,” Biden said.
In response, Netanyahu reiterated on Saturday that Israel would not accept anything that did not result in the “destruction of Hamas’s military and governance capabilities.” But notably absent was Netanyahu’s oft-stated goal of a “total victory” over Hamas.
During the Russian occupation of Kherson, Ukraine, officials took away dozens of children living in a foster home. A year later, my colleagues found their photographs on a Russian federal adoption site. Experts say what happened to the children could be a war crime.
My colleagues explain more in this video.
Lives lived:
U Tin Oo, who He died at age 97, he was a leader of Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement. He He had been defense minister before turning against the repressive government.
Birubala Rabha fought against the practice of branding women as witches in India. She died at 75 years old.
CONVERSATION STARTERS
Starlink arrives in the Amazon
The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of kilometers along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon. They have preserved their way of life for hundreds of years through isolation.
But since September, the Marubos have had high-speed Internet, thanks to Elon Musk. The 2,000-member Marubo tribe, like hundreds across Brazil, is logging on to Starlink, the satellite internet service Musk runs.
Initially, the Internet brought clear benefits, such as video conferences with loved ones far away and calls for help in case of emergency. Now they are already dealing with challenges that households around the world have long known: teenagers glued to their phones, addictive social media, strangers online, violent video games, scams, misinformation and minors watching pornography.
“People were at it all the time,” my colleague Jack Nicas, our Brazil bureau chief, explains in a video, “to the point that it became a problem for the hunting and agriculture that are necessary for their form.” of life”.