THE AFRICAN National Congress (ANC) managed to retain its position as South Africa’s most popular political party following Wednesday’s local elections, but the country’s main opposition was yesterday taking all the plaudits after it recorded its best showing in a municipal poll.
By late afternoon 80 per cent of the votes had been tallied by the Independent Electoral Commission and the results showed the ruling party had secured 64.17 per cent of the vote compared to 21.57 per cent for the Democratic Alliance (DA).
In the last municipal elections in 2006, the ANC walked away with 64.8 per cent of the vote, the main opposition, DA, had 16 per cent and the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) came in third on 7.6 per cent.
The preliminary results indicate that despite concerns over poor service delivery in many ANC-run municipalities across the country, many of its traditional supporters decided to give the former liberation movement another chance to rectify its shortcomings.
However, it was the DA who recorded the biggest improvement, with the party receiving more votes than ever before, and improving on its 2006 showing in all provinces except one. In the 1994 general election the DA only won 2 per cent of the vote.
In the DA’s stronghold, the Western Cape province, the party said it had made massive municipal election gains and would control 15 of 30 municipalities there. However, it was unclear who would win the hotly contested Cape Town metro, which the DA secured in 2006 via a coalition.
The opposition party narrowly lost its battle with the ANC for control of Port Elizabeth metro in the Eastern Cape province despite stating it hoped to win the city’s vote in the run-up to the poll.
The biggest losers appear to have been the smaller parties.
The Congress of the People (Cope) party, which secured a credible 7.8 per cent of the vote in the April 2009 general election, even though it had only been formed six months earlier, had won only 2.57 per cent of the vote by 4pm. Cope’s early promise had been squandered by infighting, and this appears to have prompted many of its mainly black middle-class support base to abandon it for the DA. The IFP also fared badly this time round, winning only 3.92 per cent of the vote by late afternoon.
The DA, which has been seen as a whites-only party by many South Africans in the past, said it took at least six per cent of the black vote nationally which, it claimed, was a good starting point to build on for the next general election.
“It’s a matter of momentum and growth . . . We want to attract much more black voters by 2014 [general election],” DA strategist Ryan Coetzee told reporters.
Political analyst Adam Habib said the DA had been very clever in its campaign strategy, using Cape Town and the Western Cape to showcase its ability to govern.