Voters in the South African general election in Johannesburg, South Africa, on May 29, 2024.
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South Africa’s ruling African National Congress has lost its parliamentary majority that it had held for three decades, marking the biggest political shift since the end of apartheid.
The May 29 vote saw the ANC receive 40% support, the Democratic Alliance (DA) receive 21.8% and the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) receive 9.5%. According to the country’s electoral commission, With 99.9% of the votes counted, the Umkhonto weSizwe party, founded in December last year and led by former president Jacob Zuma six months ago, won 14.6% of the vote.
The result marks a steep decline for the ANC from the 57.5% it won in the last election in 2019, the party’s weakest showing since South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. Long seen as a symbol of liberation, the party has been struggling with falling living standards, chronic power outages and a slump in the country’s economy. Violent crime rates at their highest in decades The unemployment rate is about 33%. In 2022, The World Bank has named South Africa “the most unequal country in the world.”
“The top concerns for voters are unemployment, power outages, corruption and crime, all of which have hurt the country’s growth performance over the years,” Deloitte analysts said. said earlier this month.
Unlike South Africa’s hero, Nelson Mandela, who freely formed power-sharing coalitions to bridge distrust between rival parties in South Africa’s fledgling democracy, the ANC’s current leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, 71, will likely have to negotiate a coalition to stay in power, prolonging negotiations and uncertainty over the country’s political direction.
Investors will be watching to see how this changes the direction of South Africa’s economic growth. This year, it is expected to grow by 0.9%. By the International Monetary Fund.
Inflation remains The latest data from May is 5.2%.That’s above South Africa’s central bank’s target of 4.5 percent, but Governor Lesetja Kganyago has said it will stabilise in the second quarter of next year. The central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at 8.25 percent on Thursday.
