South Africa Election: With preliminary results coming in, the ANC is gaining ground.
South Africa Election: With preliminary results coming in, the ANC is gaining ground.
The African General Congress appeared to be losing the parliamentary majority it has had for thirty years, according to partial results of the country’s general election. This would be the biggest political shift since apartheid ended.
Based on statistics from 10% of polling places, the ANC received 42.3% of the vote, according to the electoral commission. The Democratic Alliance (DA), which supports business, came in second with 26.3% and the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) with 8.1%.
If the end results were to match the early picture, the African National Congress (ANC) would need to form a coalition with one or more other parties in order to form government.
The newly elected National Assembly will select the future president in accordance with the nation’s constitution.
As long as the ANC is headed toward becoming the largest party in the country, its leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, is expected to remain in office as president. However, if the results are poor, he may be vulnerable to a challenge from within the party.
Every five years, the ANC has won national elections, which marked the end of apartheid and Nelson Mandela’s ascent to the presidency. This trend began with the historic 1994 election.
But since then, anger over issues like high unemployment and crime rates, frequent power outages, and corruption has caused the ANC’s once-vibrant popularity to decline.
Preliminary results show that in the vital province of Gauteng, which includes the enormous townships of Soweto and Alexandra in addition to Johannesburg, the country’s commercial center, the ANC and the DA were tied at about 34% of the vote.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the populous eastern province that is home to the significant metropolis of Durban, a new political party founded by former President Jacob Zuma, known as uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), was doing well. The ANC received 20.1% of the vote, while the MK received 41.7%.
Following a string of scandals that compelled Zuma to step down as president in 2018, he became estranged from the ANC hierarchy and chose to back MK. The group appeared to be costing the ANC and EFF votes, especially in KwaZulu-Natal. It got its name from the ANC’s military branch during apartheid.
The electoral commission is legally required to release the whole results within seven days, but in practice, they usually announce them far sooner. In the 2019 election, which was held earlier this year, voting took place on May 29 and the results were declared on May 31.
The new Parliament will convene in 14 days after the official results are announced, and its first task will be to elect the nation’s president.
This suggests that if it is established that the ANC has lost its majority, two weeks of intense and complex discussions might be required to determine how to create a new government.
About The Author
2 thoughts on “South Africa Election: With preliminary results coming in, the ANC is gaining ground.”