South Africa elections results updates: Polls show ANC could lose majority

Vote counting continues after South Africa’s general election on Wednesday. Final results are expected to be announced by the Electoral Commission this weekend.

Follow our live election results tracker here. Read more about election day here and get a refresher about the key election issues here.

Continue following all our coverage from South Africa in the coming days as we bring you the election results and more.

The first day of vote counting got under way in South Africa on Thursday after the country went to the polls a day earlier in a crucial vote for the governing ANC.

• Polls officially closed at 9pm (19:00 GMT) on Wednesday, but long voter queues and delays kept many polling stations open until about 3am (01:00 GMT) on Thursday.
• Vote counting began shortly after polls closed and continued throughout the day.
• By 4pm (14:00 GMT), results were concluded for 22.6 percent of all voting districts, the country’s Electoral Commission said.
• Just before 11pm (21:00 GMT), more than 40 percent of the vote was tallied. Counting will continue into Friday.
• Jacob Zuma’s MK party gained ground in KwaZulu-Natal, and the main opposition DA took an early lead in the Western Cape. Meanwhile, the ANC struggled more than it did in previous elections.
• Analysts say it is unlikely the ANC will get a 50 percent majority, which means the party will have to seek coalition partners to govern.
• Final results are expected to be announced by Sunday.

At just after 10:30pm local time (20:30 GMT), 40 percent of the vote was counted, according to the country’s Electoral Commission.

The ANC was in the lead nationally with 42.6 percent, but early results and projections suggested it would likely lose its outright majority.

In second place was the DA with 23.8 percent, followed by the MK with 9.8 percent, and the EFF with 9.4 percent.

The ANC had so far won the most votes in all provinces besides the Western Cape – where the DA was in the lead – and KwaZulu-Natal, where the MK was making gains.

Visit our live tracker for all the latest results from the South African elections.

Results from urban areas – traditional bastions of ANC support – could still improve the party’s prospects, but it seems all but certain that it will fall below a 50 percent outright majority.

“Big cities are the ANC’s domain historically, they’ve always done very well in the major urban centres. But what we’ve seen in the rural areas is definitely a bleeding of support. If that is repeated in the urban areas, the ANC is going to do even worse than we predict at the moment,” Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna said, reporting from the election result centre in Midrand.

“But it is a very tricky situation, because you do have a somewhat regional bias to things as well,” he added, noting that the MK has benefitted from strong results in KwaZulu-Natal, a historic hub of ANC support but also the home province of MK leader Jacob Zuma.

While data on voter participation could still change as more information from urban areas comes in, South Africa’s electoral commission said late on Thursday that, so far, voter turnout is at about 58.7 percent, news outlet the Daily Maverick reported.

That is lower than the 66 percent figures from 2019 – which undermines earlier predictions from the commission that said turnout would likely exceed the previous election.

“Analysts have told Daily Maverick that the long voting queues seen countrywide on Wednesday are not necessarily an indication of high voter turnout, but may be an indication of what’s happening inside voting stations. If you take into account the reports of delayed ballots, tech glitches and three ballot papers, it’s not rational to assume the long queues were the result solely of a high voter turnout,” the outlet said.

Former ANC activist Lawson Naidoo said the vote results will be seen as a “sobering” moment for the governing party, which has become accustomed to comfortable margins of victory in past decades.

“Current predictions show the ANC likely to come in between 40 and 45 percent of the vote, which would be a significant reduction in their support, having obtained 57 percent in the previous election,” he told Al Jazeera. “So it’s a sobering election for the African National Congress.

“It seems that the primary beneficiary of the ANC’s drop in support has been Jacob Zuma’s new MK party. The official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, seems to be staying relatively stable in the low 20 percents.”

As the votes continue to be validated, a reminder that South Africans do not directly vote for the president.

The country follows a proportional voting system where parties and candidates compete for 400 seats in parliament, known as the National Assembly.

People elect members of the National Assembly, who then select the president by a simple majority – 201 or more votes determine the presidency.

This is what the current National Assembly looks like:

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from the election results centre, says that while progress on the vote count is “like watching paint dry”, the results could add up to a seismic shift in the country’s political landscape.

“Certainly, it’s a political future that could be very, very different from the decades of the past,” said Hanna.

“We are very satisfied with the picture that is starting to emerge with the results that are out now. It’s very encouraging for our prospects in this election,” Solly Malatsi, a spokesperson for the Multi-Party Charter (MPC) opposition coalition told Hanna.

“The truth of the matter right now is that the future of governance in South Africa is coalitions,” he added.

South Africa’s Electoral Commission (IEC) has asked for help locating a missing ballot box in the KwaZulu-Natal province.

“The Electoral Commission appeals to citizens in and around Ward 14 uMhlathuze, in KwaZulu-Natal, to be on the lookout for an IEC branded ballot box that went missing in transit from the voting station … to the municipal electoral office for storage,” the body said on X, stating that the ballots in the box had already been “counted, reconciled and validated”.

“The IEC appeals to anyone who finds the ballot box to return it to us. Citizens are reminded that anyone found to be in possession of ballots is liable to criminal prosecution,” the post added.

The Electoral Commission appeals to citizens in and around Ward 14 uMhlathuze, in KwaZulu-Natal, to be on the lookout for an IEC branded ballot box that went missing in transit from the voting station Matamzana Dube School in VD 43412767, KZN282, uMhlathuze, to the municipal… pic.twitter.com/lTA8FXpDaB

— IEC South Africa (@IECSouthAfrica) May 30, 2024

Zakhele Ndlovu, a political analyst, tells Al Jazeera that some South Africans hope a change in the political landscape will help address problems like poverty and job opportunities after years of dominance by the ANC.

He says many Zulus – the country’s largest ethnic group, to which Jacob Zuma belongs – are also enthused about the candidacy of the former president.

“A lot of people who are either disgruntled or fed up with the ANC feel that the ANC has let them down,” he said.

“So they see this new political party [MK] as the alternative. And then you have a lot of Zulu speakers, Zulu people who support him [Zuma] just because in him they see themselves.”

The ANC’s outspoken support for Palestine has featured in the elections with the party playing up its efforts to hold Israel accountable through a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing it of genocide in Gaza.

Members of the anti-apartheid struggle have long seen a connection between their fight and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which a rising number of leading human rights groups have said constitutes apartheid.

“Muslim areas in Cape Town – we haven’t seen the results as yet, but from what we have picked up just on the ground and engaged, there is definitely going to be an upward surge for the ANC, and the Palestinian issue has made a massive difference,” ANC provincial spokesperson Muhammad Khalid Sayed told the Daily Maverick, a South African news outlet.

He added that the government’s reason for approaching the ICJ was not for votes but “because of our commitment to human rights and our commitment to a sovereign Palestinian state”.

Read more about how the Gaza war may have influenced voters in South Africa here.

Visit our live tracker for all the latest results from the South African elections.

Thirty years ago, South Africa overcame apartheid and held its first democratic election.

The ANC won and Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president.

Three decades before that, in the 1960s, Mandela was put on trial for sabotage by the apartheid regime. During what is known as the Rivonia Trial, he delivered one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century.

Mandela expected to be sentenced to death but instead lived to see his dream “of a democratic and free society” realised.

Read about it here.

If the ANC fails to secure a majority of the votes, it will be faced with the task of forging a governing coalition with other parties such as DA or EFF, with whom it may have unbridgeable differences on various policy issues. MK has already stated that it will not form a coalition with the ANC.

“The other option is for the ANC to cobble together a whole lot of the smaller parties who may demand less to become part of the coalition,” Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna reported from the election result centre in Johannesburg.

“The problem with that, in terms of the arithmetic, is that the ANC would have to get at least 46 percent or more of the votes to form a coalition with a number of parties.

“But as the results are coming in, that appears to be a target that may be very hard for the organisation to reach.”

While the final results will take time to become clear, there are indications that the ANC is “declining quite sharply” and is on track to finish with about 43 percent of the vote as parties like the MK make strong gains, Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna says, reporting from Johannesburg.

Hanna spoke to Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, an MK member and former President Jacob Zuma’s daughter.

“I think [the MK is becoming] a permanent fixture in South African politics. It’s one that’s needed and one that’s obviously wanted as we can see by the numbers,” she said, reiterating that there would be no coalition talks with the ANC.

“It’s what democracy is: People have the right to choose who they want to choose, and the bulk of our voters this year were young people,” she added.

ANC Deputy Secretary-General Nomvula Mokonyane has said that early voting results have been a surprise for the governing party, but that the results could still change as more votes are tallied.

“It is still early, the race is not yet over,” she said, noting that vote tallies from the KwaZulu-Natal province have been a “surprise”.

While the ANC has been a dominant force in South African politics since the end of the apartheid regime it led the fight to dismantle, some young people are disillusioned with the party and hope others can offer better economic opportunities.

“I’m sure the [MK] party will give us great job opportunities, especially us youngsters,” voter Pindile Mkhize told Al Jazeera.

“I finished school in 2010 and I still don’t have a job. The other party is promising us the jobs, but still nothing. I think the MK is going to give us a change.”

Visit our live tracker for all the latest results from the South African elections.

The ANC is likely to lose Gauteng, the most populous province, according to projections from News24.

The outlet, using a forecasting tool it developed during the last elections, projected that the ANC would get 35 percent of the vote in Gauteng, the economic heart of South Africa, which is home to Johannesburg and Pretoria.

The party narrowly held on to the province in the 2019 elections with 50.1 percent of the vote.

News24 said the ANC and EFF are already working together in key metro areas and, if the ruling party loses Gauteng, that working arrangement may be extended. However, it added that the two parties would still need other smaller parties to surpass 50 percent.