President of South Africa and the African National Congress
Cyril Ramaphosa (centre) greets voters as he arrives to cast his vote
for the general elections at the Hitekani Primary School in Soweto,
Johannesburg, on May 8, 2019. PHOTO | AFP
South African elections officials counted
ballot papers early on Thursday, a day after a vote seen as
the toughest
test yet for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party 25 years
after it swept to power at the end of white minority rule.
Most polling stations closed around 1900 GMT on Wednesday.
EARLY LEAD
Results
from some smaller voting districts started to trickle in on Thursday
morning. As of 0330 GMT, more than 1.3 million votes had been processed
out of around 26.8 million registered voters.
In
the parliamentary vote the ANC was on around 53 percent, with the
Democratic Alliance (DA) on 28 percent and the Economic Freedom Fighters
(EFF) on seven percent, with a turnout of 64 percent.
Given
that less five percent of the potential number of votes had been
processed, it was too early to make an accurate prediction about the
final result.
A full tally may not be known until Saturday.
The
elections for a new parliament and nine provincial legislatures are the
first barometer of national sentiment since President Cyril Ramaphosa
replaced scandal-plagued Jacob Zuma as head of state in February 2018.
Ramaphosa
is trying to arrest a slide in support for the ANC, which has won every
parliamentary vote since the end of apartheid in 1994 but whose image
has been tarnished by corruption scandals and a weak economy in the past
decade.
Opinion polls suggest the
ANC will again win a majority of the parliament’s 400 seats, but
analysts say its margin of victory may fall from the 62 percent of the
vote it secured in the last election in 2014 because of frustration with
slow progress addressing racial disparities in income and wealth.
The
ANC’s biggest challengers at these elections are the main opposition
party DA and the leftist EFF. The DA won 22 percent of the parliamentary
vote in 2014 and the EFF six percent.
ELECTIONS
Elections
officials said voting had in general progressed smoothly but that there
had been isolated incidents where bad weather, unscheduled power
outages or community protests had caused disruptions. The electoral
commission said it was investigating two potential instances of
double-voting.
“The Electoral
Commission will not allow the potential misconduct of one or two
individuals to taint the overall outcome of these elections,” the
commission said in a statement.
The
ANC achieved its best parliamentary election result in 2004, under
former president Thabo Mbeki, when it won 69 percent of the vote. But
its support fell under Zuma, and it lost control of big cities like the
commercial capital Johannesburg in local government elections in 2016.
The
ANC currently controls eight of the country’s nine provinces, with the
DA in power in the Western Cape. Analysts predict the provincial races
for Gauteng, where Johannesburg and the administrative capital Pretoria
are located, and the Western Cape, home to Cape Town, will be close.
Ramaphosa,
who became ANC leader in December 2017 after narrowly defeating a
faction allied with Zuma, has promised to improve poor public services,
create jobs and fight corruption.
But
he has been constrained by divisions within his own party, where some
Zuma supporters still retain influence and oppose his agenda.
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