The African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in the 2024 election, its vote share sinking to 40.27 per cent as South Africans punished the party over joblessness, inequality and power cuts.
That marked a sharp fall from the 57.5 per cent the party won in the 2019 parliamentary election, leaving it with no option but to share power with a rival, an unprecedented outcome. Vote counting was in its final stages, with tallies back from over 99 per cent of polling stations.
“We can talk to everybody and anybody,” said Gwede Mantashe, the ANC chairman and mines and energy minister, when asked who the party was courting for a coalition. The main opposition Democratic Alliance stood at 21.63 per cent, while uMkhonto we Sizwe, a newcomer headed by former president Jacob Zuma, grabbed 14.71 per cent.
Zuma has threatened to challenge the result in court, claiming, with no evidence, that the commission’s vote-counting system had been rigged. MK’s strong showing in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal was one reason the ANC fell short of a majority.
“There is peace, there is harmony,” Nomvula Mokonyane, the ANC’s first deputy secretary-general, told SABC, adding that all the parties were talking to one another. The party has won every national vote by a landslide since the 1994 election that ended white minority rule, but support has dwindled over the past decade as the economy stalled, unemployment climbed and roads and power stations crumbled.
Unemployment sits near 32%, and more than 60% of the population lives in poverty, the backdrop to an election that now forces the ANC into coalition bargaining for the first time.
Sources
- The ANC has left South Africa a land of broken dreams. Its time seems over | Simon Tisdall | The Guardian
- South Africa's ANC talking to 'everybody and anybody' for new coalition after losing majority – ABC News
