With the partial election results placing the ruling party, African National Congress (ANC) well short of a majority, South Africa seems to be moving towards the possibility of a national coalition administration for the first time.
As counting proceeded, early results showed that the ANC had garnered slightly less than 42% of the national vote in the nine provinces in the country where more than half of the votes had been counted.
Even though the official results of Wednesday’s election have not yet been released, that represented a significant decline from the 57.5% it received in the previous national election in 2019. The electoral commission stated that those would be made public by Sunday, if not earlier.
The results from more over 13,000 of the 23,000 polling stations indicated that the ANC would require a coalition partner to establish a government and reelect President Cyril Ramaphosa for a second and final term.
The leader of the main opposition party has expressed willingness to collaborate with the ANC, but would first consult with other parties with whom he has a preelection agreement.
As expected, the ANC received the majority of votes in the partial count, with the Democratic Alliance coming in second with approximately 24%. The ANC is still somehow anticipated to still remain the biggest party and have the most seats in parliament.
Opposition parties, however, were praising what could prove to be the biggest change in South African politics in three decades. As a result, analysts said that the longer it takes to form a coalition government, the greater the likelihood of market instability.
The coalition negotiations will be determined by the extent to which the ANC falls short of a majority in the final results, assuming it remains below 50%. If it is just short of a majority, it may contact many smaller parties to reach over 50%.
If it is a long way off, as it was in the most recent results, it may have to collaborate with one of the two main opposition parties, the centrist Democratic Alliance or the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters. They hold quite different ideologies. A third significant party, the MK of former South African President Jacob Zuma, has stated that it will not cooperate with the ANC.
Even though the ANC was commended for making progress in its first ten years of office and apartheid’s inequalities were always going to be difficult to overcome, it is currently held accountable by many for a number of scandals involving corruption, a lack of basic government services, and most recently, an electricity crisis that resulted in rolling blackouts affecting 62 million people nationwide.
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