ANC remains hopeful of securing majority in elections
THE political landscape in South Africa ahead of the May 29 elections is ablaze with fervent campaigning and speculation over which party will clinch power till 2029.
A plethora of opinion polls published so far have shown congruent and conflicting projections.
Opinion polling is a crucial barometer for electoral purposes because it provides valuable anecdotal evidence.
A majority of projections currently suggest that the governing African National Congress (ANC) may lose its parliamentary majority for the first time.
Nearly 28 million eligible voters are poised to participate in this year’s elections.
According to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), 55 percent of registered voters are female.
More than 45 political parties are contesting the elections.
The elections come at a time when South Africa, a regional powerhouse, has been experiencing and undergoing turbulent political and socio-economic routines, dramatically shifting the support base of the governing ANC party.
A closer evaluation of the ANC’s support, in power since 1994, shows that Africa’s oldest revolutionary party has been losing at least four percentage points of its support from elections since 2004.
In 1994, it won with a 62,6 percent margin; 66,4 percent in 1999 and its highest victory margin of 69,7 percent came in 2004.
Since the 2009 elections, the party’s support base has been shaky.
In that year’s election ANC won with 65,9 percent, a nearly five percent drop from the 2004 elections; 62,2 percent in 2014 and 57,5 percent in the 2019 elections.
The biggest threat to the ANC, according to a recent poll by the Social Research Foundation, is former president Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.
The MK is expected to siphon support from the ANC, and in that province it is projected to garner 26 percent of support, ahead of ANC’s 25 percent.
Last week, the ANC brought in political heavyweights in its campaign in the form of former presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kaglema Petrus Motlanthe, and former vice president David Mabuza to reinforce its presence.
Interestingly, besides political rhetoric, both the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) parties are not capitalising on this decline of ANC support.
But to win in politics, political parties need to maximise their ability to earn more political capital than opponents.
The Multi-Party Charter, a coalition of eight parties with a collective 112 of the 400 seats in the national assembly, is looking forward to getting a chunk of the electorate.
This drop in support for the ANC gives indications about the attitudes of the electorate towards the party in the post-apartheid era.
The elections are coming amid rising dissatisfaction by the black majority’s failure to own means of production.
The ANC says it is working to fix the problems.
The challenges are huge but not insurmountable.
Possible election outcomes
The DA, EFF and Multi-Party Charter are unlikely going to have outright majority wins.
Among the three political entities, though in the opposition, they do not share similar ideological orientations, hence their credibility test is questionable.
Based on current polls, the most likely scenario is that the ANC is either going to lose its absolute majority in parliament or will scrap a slim majority victory.
In the event of losing its majority, it will join forces with smaller, primarily centrist parties to form a coalition in exchange for policy concessions.
The EFF is also thought to be a likely outfit to enter into coalition with the ANC, however, the South African economy has already responded negatively to an ostensibly coalition of the two.
Asset allocators have started hedging against a potential ANC-EFF coalition, scared that such a government union could result in capital outflows, damagingly impacting investor sentiment.
The ANC and the EFF have already shown that they can work together.
Last November, the ANC parliamentarians joined the EFF in their proposal to have the Israeli embassy in SA closed amid that country’s war with Hamas in Gaza.
The EFF also supported the ANC government when it raised a case of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli government in January.
Secondly, any potential coalition will place the ANC at the centre of policy making to give meaningful improvements to where the party has failed and return to the 1994 values it was committed to.
A coalition government led by the ANC is unlikely to disrupt the continuity of energy policy, justice for the people of Palestine and continued efforts to meet the people’s demands.
Hopeful ANC
The ANC knows that its house is not as orderly as it should be, but it is wearing a brave face.
The rise of the MK has been dismissed by the ANC as a non-event and not “formidable” compared to the Congress of the People (COPE).
The COPE, a breakaway faction from the ANC, was founded in December 2008 ahead of the 2009 elections and won 30 parliamentary seats.
Yet, the rise of MK may indicate a turning point for the ANC, which is giving emphasis that the people must vote with Palestine and 1994 in mind.
The impact of the 1994 election moment in South Africa must not be undermined.
It brought to people a relief after years of colonialism and apartheid to give legitimacy to the majority of the black majority that was led by the ANC.
With political swings moving fast, it remains to be seen how the ANC will give direction to its members in anticipation of being the next government.
The revolutionary party has remained hopeful even when facing the threat of external besmirch by the US that it was supplying weapons of war to Russia.