South Africa's ANC party on track to face 'nightmare' losses in municipal elections

South Africa's ⁠African National Congress ​is on track for a big drop in voter support in municipal elections. ​results from more than two-thirds of the votes counted showed on Friday.

With final results expected by Sunday, the election authority dashboard showed the ANC was still the largest party with 31.8 percent of votes after 80 percent had been counted.

Projections released Thursday by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a state-funded research body, put its support at nearly 32 percent.

This was its lowest score yet for the party after it secured just over 40 percent at the 2024 national polls and 46 percent at the previous municipal elections in 2021.

"(The turnout) suggests that ANC voters did not stay away – as many expected – but rather showed up and voted for alternative parties," said Louw Nel, senior ​political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, who said an outcome of 32 percent would be "the party's worst nightmare coming true".

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"This is the most severe result that the ANC would have feared," political analyst Daniel Silke told AFP. "It's the ANC's worst result in history."

"It will undermine its ability to exert authority across South Africa, not just at a local level, but frankly at a national level as well," he told AFP.

"And opposition parties will be smelling blood when it comes to the next election in 2029."

The ANC has been South Africa's largest party since it led the country out of apartheid in 1994, but its ‌share of the vote has fallen sharply as voters have punished it for high crime and unemployment, ​corruption scandals and failing basic services like water and electricity.

The DA is on course to win an outright majority in Cape Town, but projections are ​for hung councils in other large metropolitan areas, such as Johannesburg, ​South Africa's biggest city, and Tshwane, home to the ​administrative capital Pretoria.

The outcome remains unclear in the early stages of the vote count in eThekwini, the ​municipality centred on Durban, where former President Jacob Zuma is hoping his party – a splinter from the ANC – can seize a majority.

The pro-business, centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) was placing second with 24.2 percent of votes, according to the 80 percent count. This was up from nearly 22 percent in the 2021 local government election.

Analysts have said the best option for stability in cities such as Johannesburg would be for ⁠the ANC to partner with the DA, mirroring the arrangement they have in national government. But ⁠the two ​are ideologically opposed on key issues such as racial redress.

(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)