Apartheid sucked. Sadly what replaced it in't working.
Disillusioned South Africans Turn Backs on Party That Ended Apartheid
With nearly all votes counted, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress slumped to just 40%, setting the stage for difficult coalition talks
By Alexandra Wexler and Gabriele Steinhauser, WSJ
June 1, 2024 8:45 am ET
JOHANNESBURG—Disillusioned South African voters delivered a devastating upset to the African National Congress, with the party sinking to just 40% of the vote in national elections—a result that puts into question the future of President Cyril Ramaphosa and, after 30 years in power, that of the former liberation movement itself.
A near-final ballot count from Wednesday’s national elections showed the worst result on record for the ANC and the first time since 1994 that the party won’t have an absolute majority in the country’s parliament. In the last national election in 2019, the ANC still won 57.5% of the vote and, at the height of its power in 2004, it commanded nearly 70% of the electorate.
The party of the late Nelson Mandela was undone by a seemingly incessant string of corruption scandals at all levels of government and its failure to transform Africa’s most developed economy to the point where it delivered for the country’s Black majority. Three decades after the end of apartheid, the gap between the richest and the poorest South Africans is by some measures wider than in 1994, 42% of the workforce is without jobs and nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans still live in poverty—compared with 1% of white South Africans.
Ramaphosa—the man who held Mandela’s microphone on the day he was released from prison in 1990 and was widely seen as the struggle icon’s preferred successor—now faces stark choices, and a ticking clock, for building South Africa’s first ever national coalition government.
The ANC could team up with uMkhonto weSizwe, the left-wing upstart party led by his scandal-ridden predecessor Jacob Zuma that jumped to 15% of the national vote—a pairing that would likely undo Ramaphosa’s tentative cleanup of the ruling party and, potentially, cost him his job. Or Ramaphosa could try his luck with the pro-business Democratic Alliance, which, at 22% of the vote, remains the biggest opposition party, but which large parts of the ANC’s own base perceive as representative of the country’s white-dominated past.
The ANC could also try to cobble together an alliance of smaller parties that would include the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters, whose policies are similar to those of uMkhonto weSizwe, known as the MK.
The coalition talks themselves will launch South Africa’s young democracy into uncharted territory. South African law gives parties just two weeks after the announcement of official results—expected on Sunday—for a first sitting of parliament, when a speaker and then the president must be elected. Legal experts were divided on what would happen if lawmakers failed to pick a president on that first day.
Pierre de Vos, a constitutional law professor at the University of Cape Town, said that one option would be for opposition parliamentarians to tolerate Ramaphosa or another ANC lawmaker as interim president by abstaining or spoiling their ballots and thereby give parties more time to negotiate a tie-up.
Posturing by the leading opposition parties began before the final votes had been counted.
Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, one of Zuma’s daughters, told journalists that the MK could imagine a coalition with the ANC only if Ramaphosa, who ousted her father as president in 2018 and this year supported his ejection from the ruling party, stepped aside.
“The ANC with Ramaphosa, definitely not,” she said Friday.
South Africa’s constitutional court banned Zuma, who spent 10 years in prison alongside Mandela for his efforts to defeat apartheid, from running for a seat in parliament on the MK’s ticket due to a 2021 conviction for contempt of court. But the 82-year-old’s support for the party, which was founded only in December, helped catapult it to third place in the election. In KwaZulu-Natal, Zuma’s home province, the MK was the biggest party, winning 45% of the vote.
The MK has embraced policies long championed by the left wing of the ANC, including the expropriation of land, much of which is still owned by white farmers, and the nationalization of mines. Those initiatives had fallen into the background under Ramaphosa, a union leader turned millionaire businessman, who rose to the top of the ruling party with a more moderate, centrist message.
But Ramaphosa’s failure to fix South Africa’s crumbling infrastructure—including an outdated, coal-dependent power system that has led to years of rolling blackouts—and the slow pace at which he moved against ANC members accused of corruption saw him lose the support of many voters.
Some analysts said a coalition with the DA looked more likely and could keep Ramaphosa in the presidency. But the DA’s largely white leadership—and comments by prominent members that many Black South Africans perceived as racist—could make such a tie-up unpalatable for the ANC’s left wing. White South Africans account for about 7% of the population but retain an outsize influence in business as well as an immense proportion of the country’s wealth.
The DA, for its part, risks alienating its voters by teaming up with a party it has attacked for years.
In return for its support, the DA could demand changes to South Africa’s foreign policy that would be hard to swallow for the ANC, including the future of the country’s ties with Russia and its vocal attacks and legal steps against Israel over the war in Gaza and its treatment of Palestinians.
Whatever the final coalition, analysts said, the era of the ANC’s dominance over South African politics appears to be over.
“It’s definitely been a long journey, where the ANC has slowly, slowly deteriorated and prioritized power over governance,” said Jason Swartz, a portfolio manager at Old Mutual Investment Group in Cape Town. “It’s definitely a watershed turning-point for South Africa, and the days of that Mandela-era euphoria, I think they’re gone.”
Write to Alexandra Wexler at alexandra.wexler@wsj.com and Gabriele Steinhauser at Gabriele.Steinhauser@wsj.com
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