South Africa’s Ruling Party Falls Below 40% in Poll Before May Election

South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), has fallen below 40% in a new poll, with just over two months to go before the country’s next general election on May 29.

That raises the possibility that there could be change at the national level for the first time since 1994, if the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) can put together a rival coalition to dislodge the ANC from power.

The poll, by the non-partisan Brenthurst Foundation, was conducted in late February among 1,506 registered voters in South Africa. It has a margin of error of 3% at the 95% confidence level.

It shows that the ANC has fallen from 44% of the vote in November 2022 to 39% today. The DA, meanwhile, has risen from 23% to 27% in the same period. (The ANC won 57.5% in the 2019 general election, while the DA won 20.8%.)

A new party, known as the MK Party, named after the ANC’s former guerrilla army, has surged into third place at 13%.

The radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party, a racist and communist party that favors forcible redistribution of land, fell to 10%, meaning that the ANC could not preserve its majority simply by forming a coalition with the radicals.

It is possible that the DA could finish second to the ANC in the overall vote and still put together a majority coalition by cobbling together all of the other parties other than the ANC and the EFF, for a collective 51% of the vote (in this poll).

That is what happened in Cape Town in the 2006 municipal elections: the DA won a plurality of the vote and assembled a coalition of smaller parties to oust the ANC — the first time the opposition had won in post-apartheid South Africa.

The ANC has typically over-performed its polls on Election Day, appealing to voters who remember its role in toppling the apartheid regime. But chronic electricity and water shortages, crime, and corruption have worn voters’ patience.

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.