With 94% of the vote counted Friday evening, the ANC had secured 57.7% of the national vote. However, this is the party’s worst electoral performance since it was voted into power in 1994.
Mmusi Maimane, center, leader of the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, speaks to the media in Pretoria, South Africa, on May 10, 2019.
It was also the country’s lowest-ever voter turnout at just over 65.5%, according to South Africa’s electoral commission, a stark contrast to elections in the 1990s when people waited in line for hours and more than 85% of registered voters showed up at the polls. Some ANC leaders said the party’s presumptive win was a credit to Ramaphosa’s popularity and proof that voters accepted the party’s pledge to change.
Ramaphosa narrowly secured the party’s leadership in December 2017 in a bitter contest with Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the former president’s ex-wife and continuing ally. With a weakened majority, Ramaphosa may have to offer key positions in his new government to Zuma loyalists who don’t share his vision for reform, observers say.
Younger voters, many of whom were born into a democratic South Africa and do not have the same sense of allegiance to the ANC as their parents might, have been particularly frustrated with the party’s performance. The EFF, a far-left party that has been courting the youth vote by pushing for job creation, nationalizing banks and mines, and returning land to black South Africans, had won 10.5% of the vote by Friday evening, up from 6.35% in 2014.The Freedom Front Plus, a right-wing, mainly Afrikaner party, rose to 2.34% by Friday evening from just 0.9% in 2014, likely by drawing new voters who are concerned about the government’s pledge to start seizing private land from landowners without payment.
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