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South Africa’s election on May 29 was an endurance test for the public. Queues snaked around polling stations, with voters standing in line for up to six or seven hours. Some only finally cast their votes at 3am the following morning.
However, the election proved at least as significant as had been predicted. Although the final votes are still being counted, it is clear that the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994, has suffered a major drop in support. Projections by a state research body suggest it will win just 42% of the national vote.
The ANC’s share has declined by 15 percentage points since the last general election in 2019, when it took 57.5% of the vote. This will leave President Cyril Ramaphosa without a parliamentary majority and in need of coalition allies for the ANC to continue to govern.
The party did all in its power to avert this situation. It ran an energetic campaign and mobilised its supporters across the country to go door-to-door soliciting support. Ramaphosa even used his office to deliver a contentious address on prime-time television on the eve of polling. He encouraged voters to make their voices heard in the election, then took the opportunity to highlight his government’s achievements over the past five years.
Opposition parties reacted with fury and have taken the issue to the electoral court, accusing Ramaphosa of using state resources to advance his party’s interests. But this issue will only be decided long after the election is over.
The ANC was also assisted by the state broadcaster refusing to air a controversial political broadcast by the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, despite being fined and ordered to do so by the regulator.
The ANC has had its vote eroded by the emergence of many smaller parties. The recently created uMkhonto We Sizwe party of former president Jacob Zuma has done particularly well, taking a very substantial share of the vote in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal in the country’s east.
By noon on Thursday May 30, the ANC was privately acknowledging it could no longer control KwaZulu-Natal alone. At 6pm, it reached out to other parties to begin discussions about cooperation in the province – although Zuma’s party said it would not go into coalition with the ANC.
This suggests the era of government by a single dominant party is at an end. It is a situation very few South Africans have experienced before.
In 1948, the National Party took power and introduced apartheid with a rigid hand. Then, after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990, the ANC swept its policies aside and has governed the country ever since. Although both governing parties occasionally took other parties into government, they did not rely upon them for control. This no longer looks to be the case.
What happens next?
The country’s system of proportional representation means that even tiny, regional parties can win some of the 400 seats in the National Assembly. The exact number will only be known when all votes have been counted. The law was changed in 2020 to allow independent candidates to stand, and this is the first time the system will have come into operation. How it works out remains to be seen.
The ANC will have to consider how it responds to its changed circumstances. While it will remain by a long way the largest party in government, it may be governing an unstable coalition. As South African academic and newspaper columnist Steven Friedman commented ahead of the election:
Debating whether coalitions are a good idea is pointless. They are becoming the only option in more of [South Africa’s] elections than ever before. They are already a fixture in local elections and could be needed in national government after this month’s election.
The evidence from local government in South Africa has frequently been catastrophic. Coalitions have collapsed after the larger parties were held to ransom by their smaller partners, who demand ever-more significant positions and ever-larger shares of the budget. Several cities, including Johannesburg and Pretoria, have seen coalitions fail under these pressures.
To try to avoid these pitfalls, the Democratic Alliance put together a tentative coalition of “like-minded” opposition parties prior to the election – dubbing this proposal its “Moonshot Pact”. But with the Democratic Alliance only likely to win around a quarter of the votes, this looks an unlikely option.
This leaves South Africa facing a situation it has not experienced in a lifetime. A coalition government ruled between the two world wars, but this is hardly a guide to the current situation.
A period of intense negotiations and possible instability looms ahead. This is not the result many voters will have hoped for as they queued under the blazing sun, or shivered in the early hours of the morning, to cast their ballots.
Martin Plaut is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies of the University of London.
