One-party rule ends in South Africa

South Africa went to the polls on 29 May to elect both its national and regional parliaments. For background, you can read my report on the 2019 result here; my preview of the 2014 election has more detail on the history and the electoral system. (The system has changed since then to elect half of the MPs from provincial rather than national lists, but that makes almost no difference: most people vote the same at both levels. It provides a theoretical opportunity for independents to be elected, but none were.)

Since majority rule arrived in the 1990s, the African National Congress (ANC) has always won a majority in its own right, but its vote has been steadily declining: 65.9% in 2009, 62.1% in 2014 and 57.5% in 2019. It was widely expected that this time it would drop below 50% and that, because the system is strictly proportional, it would lose its parliamentary majority.

Even so, the size of the fall was a surprise: the ANC vote dropped to 40.2%, giving it just 159 of the 400 seats (down 71) in the National Assembly. Having previously held majorities in eight of the nine provinces, it lost them in another three – including the largest, Gauteng, where its vote fell from 50.2% to 34.8%. (See official results here.)

Nonetheless, there is no prospect of the ANC being evicted from government. It has the crucial advantage that its opponents are divided and split almost equally between either side, with it occupying, in relative terms, the middle of the spectrum. To its right, a cluster of centre to right-wing parties have 30.9% and 128 seats, most of them with the Democratic Alliance (21.8% and 87 seats); to its left, the new uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) between them have 24.1% and 97 seats. Another nine small parties collected the remaining 16 seats.

So while the electorate is dissatisfied with the incumbents, it is not embracing any specific alternative: there is no agreement, in ideological terms, as to just what the problem is. It is also not particularly energised; turnout, like the ANC’s vote, has been steadily declining, this time falling another 7.4 points to 58.6%.

The biggest winner, MK, is the personal vehicle of disgraced former president Jacob Zuma: it could fairly be described as left-Trumpist, a new political trend that we’ll have more to say about in other parts of the world. Even so, with 14.6% and 58 seats it is unlikely to force its way into government, although it will presumably govern in the province of Kwazulu-Natal, where with 45.3% it won a large plurality.

Instead the ANC has two basic options for a coalition partner, either the Democratic Alliance or the EFF. (The EFF alone with its 39 seats would not quite deliver a majority, but it would be close enough for the difference to be made up with some of the very small parties.) Its ideal appears to be to entice both of them into a government of national unity, where they would balance each other’s influence.

There’s something to be said for that, since I think left and right each have part of the truth about how to address South Africa’s multitude of problems. But getting them to work together would be a mammoth task. And grand coalitions are not a permanent solution; they are at best a stopgap measure, an interim step on the way to the country developing a more workable party system.

The ANC’s position in the middle is not just a tactical advantage, it also presents it with a longer-term opportunity, to define itself as a mainstream centre-left party rather than just a catch-all trading on its historic role in fighting apartheid. To do so, as Danai Nesta Kupemba at the BBC argues, it will need to overcome its tendency to identify the party with the state. As he puts it, “Leading a revolutionary movement requires a single-mindedness and strict loyalty, while running a country needs greater flexibility, collaboration and the ability to balance the interests of different sections of the population.”

That ambiguous legacy of liberation movements is not confined to southern Africa; it’s also a factor in India, where Congress followed the same road as the ANC some decades earlier. Tomorrow we’ll look at its surprising recovery in India’s recent election.