South African President Cyril Ramaphosa leaves the National Results Operations Center following the formal announcement of the results in South Africa's general elections in Johannesburg on June 2.Jerome Delay/The Associated Press
Sanjay Ruparelia is the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, and a visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa and the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Voters have triggered a political earthquake in South Africa.
The African National Congress (ANC) has dominated since apartheid ended in 1994. But its national vote share has collapsed from 62 per cent in 2014 to just over 40 per cent in last week’s election. The ANC remains almost twice as popular as the Democratic Alliance (DA), which came in second with 22 per cent – but the results are a stunning indictment of its rule. For the first time, it will need other parties to maintain power.
The performance of breakaway factions of the ANC was a major factor, most significantly the recently established uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), championed by former president Jacob Zuma, who resigned in disgrace in 2018. His administration’s defining features were cronyism and state capture. In 2021, he was indicted for contempt by the Constitutional Court, and then barred from contesting the 2024 election. Yet the MK won 45 per cent in KwaZulu-Natal, Mr. Zuma’s home province, and almost 15 per cent nationally.The Economic Freedom Fighters, established in 2013 by former ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, came fourth with roughly 10 per cent of the national vote.
The root causes of the ANC’s accelerating decline are deeper, however. A vaunted trade-union leader during apartheid and the charismatic “master negotiator” during South Africa’s transition to democracy, the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa – elected president in 2019 – left politics after Nelson Mandela chose Thabo Mbeki as his successor instead. He enjoyed wide appeal from his time in the business world before returning to the ANC as deputy leader in 2012. But that year, the shocking police killing of 34 striking miners, with leaked e-mails later suggesting that Mr. Ramaphosa had called for intervention against the “criminal acts,” damaged his standing. He only narrowly won the party leadership in 2017, having stalled in moving against Mr. Zuma and his preferred candidate. And Mr. Ramaphosa’s penchant for consensus, which had served him well during the anti-apartheid struggle, has proven ill-suited for reforming the ANC.
Many voters still back the party, especially poorer Black citizens in rural areas and older generations that experienced the horrors of apartheid. But the Born Frees – the name for the generation born after 1994 – have only experienced ANC rule, along with the greed and cronyism of the party’s elites. Many also question Mr. Mandela’s strategy of reconciliation, suggesting he secured civil liberties and political rights without ensuring “economic freedom” for the Black majority.
So can the ANC forge a stable coalition government? South Africa’s proportional electoral system is conducive to multiparty government. But hegemonic parties are not used to sharing power and striking real compromises, and stark policy disagreements separate the main parties.
The ANC could strike a pact with the DA, the strong preference of big business and foreign investors. But its leader, John Steenhuisen, has excoriated ANC rule. The conventional market-oriented vision of the DA, and its hostility to Black economic empowerment, also offers little prospect for redressing deep inequalities. Prominent Black leaders have decamped from the DA, strengthening perceptions that it remains a party for white South Africans, and its national vote share has flatlined for a decade.
Conversely, the ANC could swing left and share power with the Economic Freedom Fighters, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the MK. But that would require Mr. Ramaphosa to step aside, and he will resist. Calls by the MK and EFF to pursue economic nationalization and uncompensated land expropriations would also trigger massive capital flight. Mr. Zuma’s autocratic populism and divisive appeals to ethnicity risk fuelling social turmoil and poor governance.
The ANC could also muster a broad ruling coalition to check possible vetoes, akin to the national unity government that formed in 1994.
Complicating the timeline – Parliament must elect a president within two weeks – are mounting intertwined crises. The expansion of cash-based grants, which now reach almost half of the population, provide critical social protection, but a decade of stagnation and forecasts of negative per-capita growth over the next five years jeopardize their sustainability. Roughly one-third of the population, and almost half of those under 35, are unemployed. Levels of economic inequality remain among the highest in the world. Violent crime afflicts many communities. Millions reside in informal settlements that lack reliable access to water, electricity and housing. It is thus unsurprising that, despite its vibrant civil society, electoral participation has fallen virtually every year from an astonishing 89 per cent of registered voters in 1999 to 58 per cent in 2024. Ominously, an estimated 33 per cent of eligible voters did not even register in this election.
The problem goes far beyond the ANC. To chart a new democratic future, South Africa needs a progressive coalition government that can revitalize electoral participation, restore state integrity and tackle the structural inequalities that reproduce its highly racialized economy.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that an estimated 60 per cent of eligible voters did not register in this election. The correct figure is 33 per cent. This version has been updated.