South Africa's political parties prepared for coalition talks on Friday as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) looks set to fall well short of a majority for the first time in three decades of democracy.
The party of the late Nelson Mandela was expected to remain the largest political force after Wednesday's election, but voters appeared to have punished the former liberation movement for years of decline. With results in from 61.2% of polling stations, the ANC received 41.9% of the vote, a significant drop from the 57.5% it won in the last general election in 2019.
The pro-business Democratic Alliance (DA) came in second with 23 percent. Former President Jacob Zuma's new party, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), had 11.7 percent of the vote and is taking support from the ANC, especially in Zuma's home province of KwaZulu-Natal. MK overtook the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), currently the third-largest party in parliament, with 9.5 percent.
The percentage of votes that parties receive determines the number of seats in the National Assembly, which then elects the next president. That could still be the leader of the ANC, incumbent President Cyril Ramaphosa. But a disgraceful election result could lead to a fierce leadership contest. But ANC Deputy Secretary-General Nomvula Mokonyane has said he will not step down.
“Nobody will step down. We all still believe that Ramaphosa should remain president of the ANC,” she told reporters at the election results centre. “The ANC leadership will meet, the ANC structures will consult. As of now, we have not spoken to anyone,” she said.
The ANC has won every national election since the historic 1994 election that ended white-minority rule, but over the past decade South Africans have watched the economy stagnate, unemployment and poverty rise, infrastructure crumble and power outages become more frequent.
Speculation was rife about which parties the ANC might approach to stay in power in a coalition, or what other negotiations might be taking place behind the scenes. DA leader John Steenhausen said talks would begin over the weekend, starting with meeting other members of the Multi-Party Constitution (MPC), the coalition of 11 opposition parties formed before the election, to see whether they could expand it.
“The election is over. We have to make good use of the hand the voters have given us, so we will look at a range of options,” he told Reuters. There is no clear path for the MPC member parties to win more than 50% of the vote and seats in parliament unless they bring in either the EFF or MK, which seems almost impossible. The DA, the MPC's largest party, has denounced the parties as extremists and said an alliance with the ANC would be a “doomsday coalition”.
Before the election, Steenhausen did not rule out teaming up with the ANC to block such a coalition, but the DA had consistently criticized the ANC and said it wanted it out of power. The uncertainty affected the government bond market, with the price of the country's main internationally traded bond falling by 1.3 cents on the dollar. The drop was the third consecutive round, taking the bond to its lowest level in almost a month.
Investors and business have expressed concern about the possibility of a coalition government between the EFF, which has called for the seizure of white-owned farms and nationalization of mines and banks, and the ANC, Mr Zuma's MKs, who have also spoken of land confiscation.The results page on the electoral commission's website, which had been updating continuously since vote counting began, went black for about two hours early Friday morning due to technical issues. The data reappeared shortly after 7 a.m.
“The data in the data center remains intact and the election results are uncompromised. The processing of the election results will continue unaffected,” the electoral commission said in a statement. By law the electoral commission must release full provisional results within seven days, but the commission said it plans to do so on Sunday.
(Additional reporting by Nqobile Dludla and Bate Felix; Writing by Alexander Winning and Estelle Shirbon; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Ros Russell)
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