Thread: Reflecting on elections in South Africa

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VIDEO: Reflecting on the elections: Elections: Multimedia: News24


Pretoria - The mighty ANC was on Saturday given a psychological blow when the final election results confirmed that it had lost its two-thirds majority.

Jacob Zuma's party received 65.9% of the vote - almost 4% less than in 2004 and it was also the ANC's weakest performance since the first democratic elections in 1994.

But the ANC's Jeff Radebe said on Saturday the party was "in no way" disappointed.
"We are very satisfied. It is a strong victory, we even got more than a million more votes than in 1994."

Yet Professor Steven Friedman, a political analyst, believes that the ANC could lose more support in future elections if it did not take the election results seriously.

"This (the loss of the two-thirds majority) is a psychological victory for opposition parties and purely of symbolic value. The ANC will not admit it in public, but it shows they will have to work harder to retain voters."
The ANC spent at least R200m on its campaign and more than 11 million people voted for them.

The DA got almost 17% support and Cope just over 7%.
Another political commentator, professor Sipho Seepe, said a DA government in the Western Cape was a threat to the ANC. "The ANC will have to do better, because if the DA does well, voters will say 'maybe we should give them (the DA) more provinces'."
The DA leader, Helen Zille, said "I have goose bumps. We are on our way to becoming a real democracy and I am very excited about this."

Lizel Steenkamp - Rapport