Patronage Partitions | South Africa after the 2024 elections
- Niall Reddy
In South Africa’s watershed election last May, the African National Congress (ANC) failed to secure an outright majority for the first time.
An uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party rally in May 2024.
In South Africa’s watershed election last May, the African National Congress (ANC) failed to secure an outright majority for the first time in the country’s democratic history, sinking 17 percentage points from five years prior to obtain just 40.18 percent of the vote. Opponents of the ruling party celebrated the sudden shift in popular sentiment. The ANC’s “liberation dividend”—the condition-free support it has been granted in appreciation for its role in delivering democracy—appeared to have expired. The ANC was becoming an ordinary party, in an ordinary country.
The sudden decline in the ANC’s electoral fortunes can’t be understood without examining the broader electoral dynamics in South Africa, key among them the emergence of the breakaway uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, formed by former ANC president Jacob Zuma just six months before the election. MK won 14.58 percent of the total vote, mostly from Zuma’s native KwaZulu Natal (KZN) province. Another relative newcomer, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), cut heavily into the ANC’s vote share in majority colored districts, mostly in the Western and Northern Cape provinces. In voting districts where the ANC was not harassed by newcomer parties, its average vote share dropped by 6.3 percentage points—a more significant drop than the last election, but no earthquake. The party still won a comfortable majority in these districts. In contrast, in areas where newcomer parties made a strong showing, ANC support plummeted, from 57.3 to 29.5 percent.
These figures suggest something simple but important: there has been a supply side issue at the heart of South African electoral politics. The glacial trends in voting behavior that we’ve seen over the past decade are not solely explained by the sheer depth of loyalty to the ANC. Rather, they have much to do with the persisting lack of credible opposition. For specific segments of the electorate, this dynamic changed in May. Where newcomer parties gained traction, the slow trickle away from the ANC turned quickly into a flood. But most voters remained uninspired—only 58 percent of those registered went to the polls—down from 66 percent in 2019—which is less than 40 percent of the voting eligible population. Reversals for the ANC and patchy gains for its opponents are producing a fragmentation of the electoral field which looks set to hold for some time.
Disorienting dominance
Read more on the full article: Published by - Phenomenal World