South Africa’s next government will be a coalition between the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and at least one opposition party, after the ANC’s collapse Wednesday’s election, as it failed to win a majority for the first time.
The preliminary results, which will be confirmed by Sunday, show the ANC with less than 42% of the vote. The leading opposition party, the centrist Democratic Alliance, has won nearly 23% of the vote. The radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) fell to fourth place with just under 10% of the vote, while the new, Zulu-dominated party of former President Jacob Zuma, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation,” or MK), is in third place at a solid 12%.
That means a variety of coalitions could be formed. The ANC could seek to bridge ethnic and political rivalries and invite the MK to form a government. It could also join with the EFF and agree to its radical, often racial policies.
Or the ANC and the DA could set aside two-and-a-half decades of political opposition to each other and form a “moderate” coalition that would leave ethnic, nationalist, and communist parties consigned to the opposition.
The latter is the least likely combination, but might do the most to reassure investors and the international community that South Africa will be somewhat stable economically, despite the new instability of domestic politics.
At the provincial level, the DA secured its majority in the Western Cape province (where Cape Town is located). The ANC fell short of a majority in Gauteng (where Johannesburg is located), in Mpumalanga, and even in its home base of the Eastern Cape, meaning coalitions will be necessary in those provinces — likely an ANC-DA coalition in Gauteng. The MK fell short of a majority in the Zulu-heavy province of KwaZulu, and will need a coalition partner there as well.
Update: It is also theoretically possible for the DA to form a coalition with other parties, and without the ANC, ousting it from power, as it did in Cape Town in 2006, the first election in which the DA unseated an ANC government. Such a coalition would include strange ideological bedfellows, but would allow smaller parties a far greater degree of control and influence than they would have in an ANC-led coalition with one or two other parties.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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