Voters during the South African general election on May 29, 2024 in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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South Africa’s ruling African National Congress lost its 30-year parliamentary majority, marking the country’s most profound political change since the end of apartheid.
According to the country’s electoral commission, popular support for the ANC in the May 29 vote was 40%, the Democratic Alliance (DA) was 21.8% and the Marxist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was 9.5%. The votes were counted. The country’s former president Jacob Zuma’s six-month-old uMkhonto weSizwe party, founded in December, received 14.6% of the vote.
The result represents a meteoric decline for the ANC from the 57.5% it won in the last election in 2019 – then the party’s weakest showing since South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994. The ANC Long considered a symbol of liberation, it has been active ever since As systemic problems such as declining living standards, chronic power outages, decades of high violent crime rates and unemployment of nearly 33% mount, the country has fallen behind in the battle over the practical aspects of governance in recent years devices. In 2022, the World Bank named South Africa the “most unequal country in the world.”
“The most important issues for voters are unemployment, load shedding, corruption and crime, all of which have been taking a toll on the country’s growth performance for years,” analysts at Deloitte said earlier this month.
Unlike the party’s hero, Nelson Mandela, who voluntarily formed a power-sharing coalition to overcome distrust of rival parties in the early years of South Africa’s democracy, incumbent ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa, 71, must negotiate a coalition to to maintain dominance – and thus give impetus to a series of conversations and uncertainty about the country’s political direction.
Investors will be watching to see how this changes the trajectory of South Africa’s economic growth, which was pegged at 0.9% this year by the International Monetary Fund.
Inflation remained at 5.2% last May, above the South African central bank’s target of 4.5%, with Governor Lesetja Kganyago saying the figure will stabilize in the second quarter of next year. The bank left its key interest rate at 8.25% on Thursday.
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2024-06-01 20:02:32
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