South African election results start coming in, trends show ANC losing ground

Johannesburg: The ruling African National Congress received around 43 per cent of the ballots cast in the general election while the opposition Democratic Alliance garnered 26 per cent, according to the latest trends as counting progressed at 23,000 voting stations across South Africa on Thursday.

However, the final result of Wednesday's election would be available only on Sunday, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) has said.

Analysts emphasised that it was still too early to confirm whether this would be a trend to support widespread predictions that the African National Congress (ANC) would lose the majority it has held since Nelson Mandela became the country’s first democratically president 30 years ago after the end of the apartheid regime.

The ANC stood at around 43 per cent of the ballots cast after about 14 per cent of the voting stations shared their results with the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) by 11 am (14:30 IST) on Thursday. The opposition Democratic Alliance had 26 per cent of the votes and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was in third place with around 8 per cent.

This year’s elections are the most hotly contested, with 52 parties, including the opposition Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) apart from the scores of independent candidates, the latter for the first time, vying for the 400 seats in the National Assembly and varying numbers of seats for the nine provincial governments.

In one of the provinces, the KwaZulu-Natal province (KZN), the ANC has less than half the seats compared to the newly-formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party, which has garnered 42 per cent votes by 11 am.

MK is led by ousted former president Jacob Zuma and KZN is Zuma’s home province, where he has large support from the majority ethnic Zulu voters. He was debarred by the Constitutional Court from being a Member of Parliament because of a previous criminal conviction for contempt of court.

Zuma was sentenced after he walked out of a hearing of the Commission of Inquiry into State Capture. However, Zuma’s face still appeared on the ballot papers on Wednesday because the IEC said it was too late to reprint the millions of them.

Incidentally, one of the first results to come in was from the small population, mainly employees, on the once infamous Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other leaders spent decades as political prisoners before the venue became a national heritage site and an internationally renowned tourist attraction.