NATIONAL NEWS - In the absence of a major surprise, the African National Congress (ANC) will have to admit that it has lost its outright majority in the National Assembly.
More than 40% of the votes have been counted, representing a significant sample size of what to expect from the overall results.
As expected according to recent opinion polls, support for the ANC has dropped below 50%, to around 43%.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) has done better, with its support increasing to around 25%, while the new uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP) won big support in KwaZulu-Natal – translating to close to 10% of total votes in SA.
It looks like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has lost a bit of its support to MKP. Based on the count thus far, the EFF has seen its slice of the vote fall from around 11% in the 2019 elections to less than 9%.
Several opinion polls ahead of the elections predicted that the ANC would continue to lose support, as it has in every election since the high point in 2004 when the ANC secured nearly 70% of the votes.
In essence, bad government started to catch up with the ruling party in the 2014 elections when its support dropped to below 60% for the first time since it came to power in 1994, falling to 57.5%.
In contrast, support for the Democratic Alliance (DA) has grown steadily during the past decade or so. In 1999, the DA (then the Democratic Party or DP) won 9.6% of the votes, which increased to 12.4% in 2004 and 16.7% in 2009.
In 2014 the DA got 22.2% of the votes and in 2019 21%, with its largest support base in the Western Cape.
Read more on Caxton publication, The Citizen
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