Seen against the drama of South Africa's watershed election in 1994, the general election next week - the first since the African National Congress came to power - is a strangely muted affair.

Mercifully, there has been no repetition of the high level of violence which accompanied electioneering for the 1994 poll, and threatened to soar out of control in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the African National Congress and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party were seemingly locked in a contest to the death.

One indicator of the low level of excitement or, more positively, the increased political tolerance is the posters of the rival contestants which adorn lampposts on the streets of all the major cities and many of the towns. They are left intact to compete for the attention of the more than 18 million registered voters.

Where there was an element of doubt about the eventual victor in 1994 (the ANC, although the favourite, had never fought a nationwide election), the winner in the pending election is a foregone conclusion: the ANC, now led by Mr Thabo Mbeki who, barring death, will be inaugurated as South Africa's second democratically-elected president after the June 2nd election.

All the major opinion polls concur that the ANC will emerge as by far and away the biggest party, winning at least 60 per cent of the vote. The only question to be settled is whether the ANC will attain a two-thirds majority and thus be in position to alter the constitution unilaterally.

Several polls have predicted that it will fall short by a whisker.

But it would be a brave psephologist who excluded the possibility that Mr Mbeki's ANC would command a two-thirds majority. The ANC campaign has been gaining momentum steadily over the past three months. That suggests that it is successfully consolidating its supporters behind it, including those who, disappointed with the ANC's failure to fulfil all its 1994 election promises, planned a few months ago to abstain from voting.

A second question which exercises the minds of political observers is whether Mr Tony Leon's minuscule Democratic Party will oust the New National Party as the official opposition. The polls predict a close call, with both parties garnering between 7 and 9 per cent of the vote.

That forecast reflects one of the major political developments since the ANC came to power five years ago: the decline of the National Party, now renamed New National Party to distance itself from its apartheid past. Once the colossus of South African politics - it governed the country for 46 years, from 1948 to 1994 - the party has shed more than half the 20 per cent of the vote it won in 1994.

It takes no great prescience to predict that the ANC's dominance and South Africa's status as a one-party-dominant state will be affirmed by the pending election. Even if the ANC fails to win a two-thirds majority, its dominance will be enhanced because the gap between it and the next-biggest party will be greater than it was in 1994.

Extrapolation from the polls suggests that its share of the votes cast will be at least 55 per cent greater than the share won by the next biggest party, instead of the 40 per cent which pertained after the last election.

Concomitant with that is another almost certain feature of the political configuration after June 2nd. The total opposition vote is likely to be smaller than the 37 per cent recorded after the 1994 poll.

The emergence of an even more dominant ANC has generated concern in some quarters for the survival of democracy in South Africa. The fear is that a strengthened ANC will fail to distinguish between itself as the ruling party and the state, that it will conflate the two.

These fears have been aggravated by the promotion of ANC luminaries to top positions in supposed apolitical institutions.

Thus the governor-designate of the Reserve Bank and one of his deputies (Mr Tito Mboweni and Mr Gill Marcus) are ANC politicians, distinguished thus far by their loyalty to the ANC rather than their prowess as bankers.

Similarly, the newly-appointed national director of prosecution is an ANC man (Mr Bulelani Ngcuka), whose actions since taking office have not assuaged fears that he is a political appointee with a political agenda. His controversial interventions include chiding a white judge for not granting bail to ANC men appealing against their convictions for murdering civilians in 1993, and threatening to prosecute an Inkatha leader for his role in stashing arms in KwaZulu-Natal before the 1994 election.

But concern over an ANC government which cannot be checked by a disparate array of opposition parties has to be balanced against the risks of a weak ANC clinging to its majority by the proverbial hair's breadth.