Our website use cookies to improve and personalize your experience and to display advertisements (if any). Our website may also include cookies from third parties like Google Adsense, Google Analytics, and Youtube. By using the website, you consent to the use of cookies. THE formal handing of the results by the Electoral Commission of South Africa to President Cyril Ramaphosa was meant to be a ceremony of closure. It became, instead, the formal notice of a political era ending. The African National Congress, the party that has governed South Africa since 1994, finished first on the national proportional ballot, but with about 31% of the vote, down from roughly 46% in 2021 and from the 40% it recorded in the 2024 general election. First place, on that arithmetic, is not a victory. It is a wake. The ANC has now lost ground in two successive elections under Ramaphosa, and the second fall is steeper than the first. The rejection was not confined to one province or one demographic. It came from the metros, the towns, the townships and the villages. Voters who once queued in the dawn cold to vote for the movement of Mandela, Tambo and Sisulu have, in large numbers, stayed home, switched sides or simply stopped believing. The ANC still has the most votes. What it no longer has is the benefit of the doubt. The biggest winner is the Democratic Alliance. Under Geordin Hill-Lewis, the DA took about a quarter of the national proportional vote, stronger than any of its rivals bar the ANC, and it emerged as the leading party in most of the country’s big metropolitan councils. The provisional metro picture, drawn from counts reported as results were finalised, tells the story: These are the commercial and political engines of the nation: the places where the money is made, the budgets are spent and the national mood is formed. That the DA now commands the largest share in them is the single most important fact of this election. There is a deeper significance. The DA’s own projections suggest it drew more than a million votes from Black South Africans, a claim that, if sustained by the final data, would mean the party has begun to crack the racial ceiling that has defined its politics for a generation. The voters’ priorities are legible: water that runs, lights that stay on, roads without craters, and councils that do not steal. Party loyalty, for a growing share of the electorate, now comes second to those things. Precision matters here, because the story is dramatic enough without embellishment. The DA did not win every metro outright, and in none of the hung metros did it secure a majority on its own. The ANC is still the leading party in Buffalo City, where it polled about 42%, with the UDM second. Mangaung, in the Free State, was a knife-edge between the ANC and DA, separated by a fraction of a percentage point in the counts reported. And in eThekwini, the political centre of KwaZulu-Natal, it is Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party that leads, with about 40%, ahead of the DA at around 24% and the ANC at about 17%. In the provinces, the picture is equally uneven. The ANC retains commanding positions in Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and the North West. The DA leads Gauteng and the Western Cape. And MK, in only its first local government election, leads KwaZulu-Natal. Of 205 local councils reporting, 125 were hung, with no party holding a majority. The outcome is therefore not a transfer of power from one party to another. It is the end of dominance, and the beginning of a politics in which no party can govern alone. MK’s showing is the other great story of the night. The party won its first outright municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, taking Richmond with more than 56% of the vote, and it displaced the ANC as the leading party in eThekwini. Nationally, MK sits third with just under 10%. Its strength is deep but regional: a KwaZulu-Natal force that has, for the ANC, turned the former president from a nu
También lo cubren: The African Mirror.
🔗 Leer la noticia completa en The African Mirror (Sudáfrica)
Ver más en News Today