The African National Congress lost its political dominance over South Africa after Saturday’s election results showed that with almost all votes counted, the party had received only about 40 percent, falling short of winning an outright majority for the first time. since they beat the last game in Africa. white-led regime 30 years ago.
As South Africans face one of the world’s highest unemployment rates, electricity and water shortages and rampant crime, the ruling party still outperformed its competitors but could not sustain the nearly 58 percent of the vote it garnered in the elections. last elections, in 2019.
The stunning fall of Africa’s oldest liberation movement put one of the continent’s most stable countries and its largest economy on an uneasy and uncharted course.
The party, which rose to international recognition on the shoulders of Nelson Mandela, will now have two weeks to cobble together a government by teaming up with one or more rival parties that have derided it as corrupt and have vowed never to form an alliance with it.
“It has opened our eyes to say, ‘Look, we are missing something, somewhere,'” said Maropene Ramokgopa, one of the senior officials of the African National Congress, or ANC. “It is something that is necessary to push us to have a true renewal of the ANC”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who leads the ANC, faces a serious threat to his ambition to serve a second term. He will be forced to summon the negotiating skills that helped him bring about the end of apartheid and rally his highly fractured party, which is likely to disagree over which party to ally with.
Critics are expected to place the blame for this fall on Ramaphosa and could try to replace him, possibly with his deputy, Paul Mashatile. The party’s previous biggest drop from one election to the next was 4.7 percent, in 2019.
“I didn’t expect Ramaphosa, in five years, to make things worse than what he found,” said Khulu Mbatha, an ANC veteran who has criticized the party for not tackling corruption aggressively enough.
The parties must determine their coalition agreements before the 400-member National Assembly must meet and elect the president. There were 52 parties in the national elections and the number of seats parties receive in the Assembly is based on the percentage of votes they obtained. Without an absolute majority, the ANC can no longer elect the country’s leader.
“South Africa is going to go through teething problems as we enter this era,” said Pranish Desai, a data analyst at Good Governance Africa, a nonpartisan organization. “Some of them may be important, but the voters decided they want this.”
Because of the large gap to reach 50 percent, the ANC cannot simply attract smaller parties that would have allowed it to maintain its dominance in government, political analysts said. Instead, he will have to turn to some of the larger parties with whom he exchanged bitter criticism during the campaign.
A big question is whether the ANC will embrace or reject the new party led by Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa’s arch-nemesis and predecessor as president and leader of the ANC.
Zuma, who was forced to resign in 2018 due to corruption scandals, felt betrayed by the party and Ramaphosa, his former deputy, and helped start a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, which was the name of the ANC. . armed wing during the fight against apartheid. Zuma was banned from running for parliament, but MK performed remarkably at the polls, analysts said, diverting crucial votes from the ANC and other parties.
“Of course this has surprised the ANC,” Nomvula Mokonyane, one of the ANC’s senior officials, said of MK’s performance. “It’s beyond what we expected.”
Zuma’s party officials have said they are willing to work with any party, meaning it is not out of the question for Zuma to reunite with his former friends, now enemies, although this could be humiliating for the ANC.
Another potential ally of the ANC is the Democratic Alliance, which won the second highest percentage of votes. Some ANC members have accused the Democratic Alliance of promoting policies that would essentially take the country back to apartheid. Others see a partnership between the two parties as a natural choice because the Democratic Alliance’s vision of the market-based economy aligns closely with Ramaphosa’s.
But entering this grand coalition could prove politically risky for Ramaphosa because the Democratic Alliance has strongly opposed race-based policies aimed at increasing black employment and wealth. The Democratic Alliance has also promoted issues that serve the right-wing white population.
Instead, the ANC could turn to the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party founded a decade ago by one of the ANC’s expelled youth leaders, Julius Malema. Analysts said this partnership could scare off big business and international investors because of the Economic Freedom Fighters’ insistence on nationalizing mines and other businesses, and taking land from white owners to redistribute to black South Africans.
But such a coalition would be attractive to some members of the ANC because Malema was one of their own, and there is a large segment of the party that is ideologically aligned with the Economic Freedom Fighters’ philosophy on wealth redistribution.
There are fears that the country is heading towards political chaos that will divert 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.
The country has faced dire economic and social challenges, and many South Africans wonder if they have truly been liberated from apartheid. For many people, these elections represented an opportunity for a reset on par with the transition to democracy a generation ago.
During the elections, the slogan “2024 is our 1994” circulated on social media and on campaign posters, especially among young South Africans.
The decisive election ended the dominance of a party that led the fight against colonialism, which reshaped Africa in the second half of the 20th century. The party’s ban by the racist apartheid government sent many of its leaders into exile around the world. The stories of the torture and hardship these party members endured helped make many of them heroes in the eyes of South Africa and the world, a reputation that kept many voters who grew up under apartheid eternally loyal to the party.
But that loyalty waned as many South Africans failed to see their material conditions improve significantly during decades of ANC leadership, while many of the party’s leaders amassed enormous wealth. Younger South Africans who did not live under white rule have become a growing part of the electorate and tend to be less interested in the party’s aura than its performance in government.
Some of the country’s southern African neighbors are governed by former liberation movements that are close allies of the ANC and have also seen declining electoral support. The outcome of South Africa’s elections could herald the downfall of other liberation parties, analysts said.
Mavuso Msimang, a veteran ANC member, said that as he walked past the long queues outside polling stations on election day, he was worried the party would be punished for failing 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 taking our lights off,’” he said. “It was clear that these people were not going to vote for us.”