Voters in the South African general election in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 29, 2024.
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South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has lost its parliamentary majority that it had held for three decades, marking the biggest political shift since the end of apartheid.
With 99.9% of the votes counted, the country’s electoral commission announced that the ANC received 40% public support in the May 29 vote, the Democratic Alliance (DA) 21.8% and the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) 9.5%. Umkhonto we’Sizwe party, formed six months ago in December and led by former president Jacob Zuma, won 14.6% of the vote.
The result marks a steep decline for the ANC from the 57.5% it won in the last election in 2019. At the time, that share of the vote was the party’s lowest since South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in 1994. Long seen as a symbol of liberation, the ANC has been on the back foot in recent years in battling the practice of governing amid growing structural problems, including declining living standards, chronic power outages, decades-high violent crime rates and an unemployment rate of nearly 33%. In 2022, the World Bank named South Africa the “world’s most unequal country.”
“The top concerns for voters are unemployment, power outages, corruption and crime, all of which have negatively impacted the country’s growth performance over the years,” Deloitte analysts said earlier this month.
Unlike South Africa’s hero, Nelson Mandela, who freely formed power-sharing coalitions to bridge distrust between rival parties in South Africa’s fledgling democracy, the ANC’s current leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, 71, will likely have to negotiate a coalition to stay in power, prolonging negotiations and uncertainty over the country’s political direction.
Investors will be watching to see how this changes the direction of South Africa’s economic growth, which the International Monetary Fund forecasts at 0.9 percent this year.
The latest inflation figure for May stood at 5.2%, above the South African central bank’s target of 4.5%. Governor Lesetja Kganyago has said inflation will stabilise in the second quarter of next year. The central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at 8.25% on Thursday.
