Early South African election results show ANC could lose majority

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Early tallies in South Africa’s national election suggest the governing party, the African National Congress, risks losing its parliamentary majority.

Most polling stations closed at 9pm on Wednesday, despite glitches in voting systems in some places. By about 8am on Thursday, 11.3 per cent of the voting districts had completed counting.

The ANC under President Cyril Ramaphosa was leading in these early voting districts, with 42.8 per cent of the votes, while the opposition Democratic Alliance had 25.5 per cent, followed by Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters at 8.3 per cent.

The MK party, founded with a radical agenda six months ago by former president Jacob Zuma, was at 7.8 per cent. The ANC’s vote tends to rise, however, as more rural voting districts report results, while that of the DA tends to fall.

“It’s still quite early to make projections based on these early results,” said Dawie Scholtz, an election analyst for News24. “The smallest voting districts declare first, so it’s hard to say if this is representative of the final result.”

A model of predicted outcomes, developed by South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, put the ANC’s likely share of the final vote at just under 42 per cent. “This is based on the projections made once we have 5 per cent of the vote. There is a margin of error of 2 percentage points,” said Pravesh Debba, CSIR project leader.

A pre-election poll from the Social Research Foundation on May 27 put the ANC’s likely share of the vote at 42.2 per cent, with the DA at 21.6 per cent, the MK party at 12.4 per cent and the EFF at 10.8 per cent.

This is a developing story