As the shapes of our cities and towns become clearer, the change that will reverberate the most is national: support for the ANC countrywide dropped to below 50%.
The percentages used in this article are modelled projections by the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) and not final results. Based on previous voting patterns, demographics and turnout, these have been very accurate in the past. At 4.30pm on Tuesday, the ANC was sitting on 46.5%.
While SA cities and towns have been run by coalitions before, the ANC’s fall through the floor of 50% is of huge significance for its future trajectory. It raises the prospect that it could ultimately be removed from power.
While it will be a psychological boost for opposition parties ahead of the 2024 general election, it also opens the way to a SA where power is more regionally disbursed, and where the ANC slips from power in provincial government, in the same way that happened in the Western Cape. It is notable that the ANC’s decline in the Western Cape continued in this election to barely more than 20%. It is unlikely ever to recover.
It is possible to imagine a similar decline in KwaZulu-Natal where the ANC’s fall since the end of Jacob Zuma presidency has been most precipitous. This is not a surprise as it was the ethnic factor that allowed the ANC to grow so strongly under Zuma. It is now projected to shrink back to about 40%.
The corresponding growth in IFP support across the province, as well as the clean sweep by the ethnically based party over Zululand towns, has been remarkable. From 15.7% in 2011, the IFP provincial proportional share is projected to be 24.9%.
With both the DA (projected at 14%) and the EFF projected to reach 9%, a different future has begun to emerge for the province, where there may not be a majority party for many years to come.
In Gauteng, the other province where the ANC’s decline was disastrous (projected down to 36.3%) a multiparty coalition looks set for many years ahead. While the pattern here does seem to be that ANC voters stayed at home and did not vote — giving the ANC hope for recovery in the future — it is a long way back to 50%, and it will not be easy.
In Gauteng, as will be the case nationally, it will take many, many years to repair the damage to water, sewerage and roads infrastructure wrought by ANC-led councils, with municipal infrastructure budgets already deep into a cycle of cuts as SA struggles to overcome its national debt problem.
The electricity crisis is far from solved, despite the ANC’s sudden energetic attempts to broaden the city’s suppliers at the very last minute.
So, even with its most popular leader since Nelson Mandela, the ANC — promising renewal and change — has not been able to convince voters of its credibility. For the party, there is a risk that this will continue since living conditions of people, particularly in poor communities, will take a long time to get demonstrably better.
The DA is doing a better job of holding on to its respectability. With a national projection of just more than 22% it is not far off from the 21.9% it got in 2019, and will argue that it has stopped the bleeding and has consolidated its base as it set out.
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But that would be a little too optimistic. Over this election the FF Plus continued to grow by a projected 0.5 percentage points. Small parties also ate into its base in Johannesburg, where ActionSA showed up as the biggest winner of this election, while GOOD and the Patriotic Alliance (PA) emerged as small but meaningful contestants for the coloured vote.
There are existential implications of the election outcome for both of the two biggest parties. The largest of these will be how they shape themselves in their choice of coalition partners.
While parties always argue that they do not compromise their values or strategy when involved in coalitions, this is never true.
Some degree of compromise is always necessary, to the extent that a party may end up embracing a policy it has been against steadfastly. An example of this was the DA’s embrace of the EFF policy of “insourcing” — hundreds of contract workers, such as security guards, were hired directly by the city, at large expense, to keep a coalition supporter happy.
For the ANC, the choice is between the DA and the EFF. In most metros, the EFF is not strong enough to put the ANC in power. The DA would make for the most stable coalition partner. While this would be a hard-sell among ANC voters — in a recent survey by Victory Polling for News24, 49% of black voters said the word that best described the DA was “racist” — it is an option most favoured by the reformers in the ANC.
The centre right (the DA) and the centre left (the ANC) have the most common ground between them, they argue, and is the ideological fit that is the most logical.
There are huge risks for the ANC to enter into coalition with the EFF, while the two compete for the same pool of voters. The ANC’s internal reform agenda and Ramaphosa’s economic reform agenda would be dragged in the mud and compromised.
There is little prospect, for instance, of a liberalised electricity market — the ANC’s biggest revelation during the campaign — in an EFF coalition.
The DA has made it clear that its sordid affair with the EFF was horrible. But messages on the ANC have been mixed. Leader John Steenhuisen says that there has been confusion about some of his statements in which he has been open to working with reformists in the ANC.
But in reality those reformists are embedded within a party, which he says has policies with which the DA differs sharply.
Even more important is the simple reality that the DA has built its entire electoral offering on getting the ANC out of power. To go into government with it, would give the lie to all of that and make it vulnerable again to attack by smaller opposition parties.
For the DA — which, ironically, also seeks a coalition of the centre — the only possible route is for the ANC to break up first. A coalition with an unreformed ANC, says Steenhuisen, would leave the ANC with no incentive to change.
From coalition choices, as well as the electoral outcomes, more strategic consequences flow. In the case of the ANC, a dominant concern of the market has been the security of Ramaphosa’s position and whether a poor ANC electoral showing could lead to his ousting.
While the result will no doubt be used as a weapon against him — Zuma’s daughter, for instance, has been crowing about the poor showing in KwaZulu-Natal after her father’s jailing — it is equally a weapon for those who want reform.
To all and sundry in the ANC who are honest enough to see it, the message is now abundantly clear: show us a better life, your promises no longer cut it. To survive in power the ANC will have to change. Its problem is whether it can do so sufficiently and hold together, and whether it has left itself enough time.
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