June 02, (THEWILL) – The African National Congress party (ANC) has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, partial results from Wednesday’s general election, showed on Saturday.
The historic election result puts South Africa on a new political path for the first time since the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule. With more than 99 percent of votes counted, the once-dominant ANC had received just over 40% in Wednesday’s election, well short of the majority it had held since the famed all-race vote of 1994 that ended apartheid and brought it to power under Nelson Mandela.
The independent electoral commission will still formally declare the final results. At the start of the election, the commission said it would formally declare the results by Sunday.
According to the constitution, the party with the largest vote has two weeks from the result confirmation to form a new government.
While opposition parties have hailed the result as a momentous breakthrough, the ANC somehow remained the biggest party. But it now has the option to form a coalition government with one or more opposition parties to remain in power and re-elect South African President Cyril Ramaphosa for a second and final term.
More than 50 parties contested the election, many of them with tiny shares of the vote, but the Democratic Alliance Party (DA) and the newly formed uMkhontowe Sizwe party (MK) appear to be the most obvious for the ANC to approach, given how far it is from a majority.
The DA was on around 21% of the vote. The new MK Party of former president, Jacob Zuma, who has turned against the ANC he once led, was third with just over 14% of the vote in the first election it contested. The Economic Freedom Fighters was in fourth with just over 9%
