Will South Africa’s ANC have a parliamentary majority?

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 females.

Over 45 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 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 it 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 ANC, according to a recent poll by the Social Research Foundation, is former president, Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party in his home province of KwaZulu Natal.

MK is expected to siphon support from ANC, and in that province it is projected to garner 26 percent of support, ahead of ANC’s 25 percent.

Last week, ANC brought in political heavyweights in its campaign in the form of former presidents, Thabo Mbeki and Kaglema Mothlante, and former Vice President David Mabuza to reinforce its presence.

Interestingly, besides political rhetoric, both the opposition, Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) parties are not capitalising on this dramatic decline of ANC support.

But to win in politics, parties need to maximise their ability to earn more political capital than their 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 ANC gives indications about the attitudes of the electorate towards the party in the post-apartheid era, which has been littered with unfulfilled promises and broken commitments.

The elections are coming amid rising dissatisfaction by the black majority’s failure to own means of production, are landless, experiencing high levels of unemployment and job inequality, and power generation subdued.

Prospects of equality for the majority black South Africans are taking long to be realised. ANC says it is working to fix the problems. The challenges are huge, but not insurmountable. Corruption in private and the public sector, high crime rates where least 130 cases of rape and an average 84 murders happen daily are some the challenges confronting the ANC government. Possible election outcomes

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 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.

EFF is also thought to be a likely outfit to enter into coalition with 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.

ANC and the EFF have already shown that they can work together. Last November, the ANC parliamentarians joined EFF in their proposal to have the Israeli embassy in SA closed amid that country’s war with Hamas in Gaza.

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 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 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.