South Africa’s Ruling Party Falls Below Majority in Municipal Elections

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) fell below the crucial 50% mark in this week’s nationwide municipal elections, marking the first time since the first fully democratic elections in 1994 that the ANC has lost majority support.

According to South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission, which has been counting votes since the Monday election, the ANC achieved only 46%, down from 54% in 2016 and nearly 65% in 2006, which was the party’s best result to date.

The main opposition party, the center-left Democratic Alliance (DA), won nearly 22% of the nationwide vote, down from the nearly 27% it won in 2016, but enough to retain key municipalities, including an outright majority in the city of Cape Town.

Elsewhere, the DA was running closely behind the ANC in Johannesburg and Tshwane (Pretoria), where neither party won a majority. The radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) won over 10% nationally, up from about 8% in 2016.

The election results, which were delayed by electricity cutoffs that have become increasingly common, were a rebuke of the ANC’s poor governance. The ruling party acknowledged the message from voters, according to Reuters: “These results, and the turnout, is a message to our movement to shape up,” ANC Deputy Secretary General Jessie Duarte told reporters.

In Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis celebrated becoming the city’s new mayor, and promised to restore hope to the city.

The future is uncertain, both for the ANC and the DA. For years, the DA has sought to push the ANC below 50%, hoping then to oust it from power in a national election by leading a coalition with smaller parties that would, together, exceed 50%.

But the DA also suffered a decline, thanks in part to disillusionment among the minority voters that form the party base. And past DA alliances with parties like the EFF have collapsed, allowing the ANC to retake municipalities where it lost power.

The next national and provincial elections are scheduled for 2024; the ANC typically does worse in municipal elections.

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). His new novel, Joubert Park, tells the story of a Jewish family in South Africa at the dawn of the apartheid era. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, recounts the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.