South Africa’s ruling party suffers biggest election setback

“The Democratic Alliance is on the cusp of achieving something incredible and historic”, Mmusi Maimane, the DA’s first black leader, said on the eve of the election.

BLUSTERY winter weather settled over South Africa on August 3rd as voters handed the ruling African National Congress a sharply diminished share of the vote in local-government elections, the most competitive polls since the end of apartheid.

With about half the ballots counted Thursday, the ruling African National Congress had won 52 percent of the vote and 21 municipal councils, compared to almost 30 percent and 6 councils for the opposition Democratic Alliance.

It had set its sights on winning the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela Bay, taking in Port Elizabeth and Tshwane, which encompasses the capital Pretoria.

The election losses have threatened two decades of dominance by the ANC, the former anti-apartheid movement.

ANC secretary general, Gwede Mantashe said they were comfortable with the early lead.

The ANC chairman in Gauteng province, which includes both Tshwane and Johannesburg, said his party was also seeking to form a coalition to govern both municipalities, adding there was likely to be no outright victor in either of the urban areas.

“The DA has a lot more appeal than before”, said 30-year-old Port Elizabeth township resident Chimone Ferreira, who voted for the DA for the first time this week.

With solid support in rural areas, the ANC still has majority support across the country, a reflection of its liberation struggle history and the significant improvement in basic living standards for poor South Africans since apartheid.

South Africans have once again come out countrywide to reaffirm the ANC’s progressive, pro-poor, pro-development service delivery agenda.

Nelson Mandela Bay tells a different story with polls suggesting the municipality could join Cape Town as a future DA stronghold.

With counting nearly over, the DA has 43% of the vote compared with the ANC’s 41% in Tshwane, the municipality that includes Pretoria. The ANC was also unlikely to make it to a 50% outright majority in the capital Pretoria and economic-hub Johannesburg. But he was sticking with the ruling party for now, despite the travails of its leader.

The African National Congress – the party of Nelson Mandela – just had its worst election since 1994.

The results, most of which are expected on Thursday, may pile pressure on Zuma to step down before his second term ends in 2019 when the national elections are due.

“While the middle classes are upset about government incompetence and corruption, the working classes are economically frustrated by the lack of jobs – good paying or not”, said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, DaMina Advisors chief Africa frontier markets analyst and global managing director.

With 13.1 million, or about 86 percent of the estimate of proportional representation votes cast nationally in the election counted as of 8:20 a.m. on Friday, the ANC had 54.7 percent of the total support, followed by the DA with 26.6 percent, according to the commission.

But this was down sharply from 62 percent in the 2011 municipal elections, suggesting voters are losing patience with Zuma, who rattled investors in December by changing finance ministers twice in a week, sending the rand currency plummeting.

“The ANC is an organization in crisis”, said its firebrand leader Julius Malema on Tuesday.

Calls for Zuma, 74, to resign have mounted since the nation’s top court ruled in March that he violated the constitution by refusing to repay taxpayer money spent on upgrading his private home.

In the municipal elections, the ANC even lost Zuma’s hometown of Nkandla in Kwa-Zulu Natal province, where the Inkatha Freedom Party won.