ANC set to lose majority

JOHANNESBURG, May 30 (AFP): South Africa's ruling ANC was on course to lose its 30-year-old unchallenged majority on Thursday after voters queued long into the night to cast their ballots, preliminary results and projections showed.
With a fifth of votes tallied, the ANC was leading but with a score of 44 percent-well down on the 57 percent it won in 2019 -- followed by the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) at 25 percent, according to authorities.
The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was in third place with nine percent of the vote, trailed by former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) on eight.
The final results are not expected to be known before the weekend.
"The broad church of the ANC has taken a substantial knock. This is a shock to the system for the ANC and ultimately will also be a shock to the system for the average South African, who has only known ANC rule since 1994," said political analyst Daniel Silke.
"It redraws the political boundaries of South Africa and creates a degree of uncertainty".
If President Cyril Ramaphosa's party is confirmed as dropping below 50 percent, it would force him to seek coalition partners to be re-elected to form a new government.
That would be a historic evolution in the country's democratic journey, which was underlined by newspaper headlines on Thursday.
"SA on the cusp of shift in politics," read the front page of daily BusinessDay. "The people have spoken," headlined The Citizen. The ANC has dominated South Africa's democracy with an unbroken run of five presidents from the party.
The party remains respected for its leading role in overthrowing white minority rule, and its progressive social welfare and black economic empowerment policies are credited by supporters with helping millions of black families out of poverty.
But over three decades of almost unchallenged rule, its leadership has been implicated in a series of large-scale corruption scandals, while the continent's most industrialised economy has languished and crime and unemployment figures have hit record highs.
As life slowly returned to normal in central Johannesburg after voting day on Thursday, Shaun Manyoni, a 21-year-old student, having a morning beer outside his university, said his vote would help deliver change.
"The people in power are hopefully going to come down and we will have a new political party," he said.