Cape Town — [Report updated] Energized by a split in the liberation movement which led South Africa to freedom, voters turned out in huge numbers for the country's fourth democratic elections on Wednesday, forcing electoral officials to keep polling stations open until late in the night in some places.
Results published by late on Thursday showed that voting trends were much as predicted, with the ruling African National Congress (ANC) on track to win a comfortable majority, with the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), running in second place, with prospects poor for the Congress of the People (COPE), which was formed by dissatisfied ANC leaders after former president Thabo Mbeki was fired by the ANC last year.
In the most serious incident which has been linked to political tension, COPE's branch secretary in the Port Elizabeth community of Motherwell in the Eastern Cape was shot dead on Wednesday night. COPE said in a statement that the killing of Gerald Yona "appears to be a politically-motivated assassination." The ANC condemned "this criminal act."
On Thursday afternoon it was impossible to judge whether the ANC will retain its two-thirds majority – which would enable it to change the Constitution unilaterally, should it choose to do so. At 5.30pm the ANC held 66.57 percent of the votes counted.
A leading opinion poll company suggested on the eve of the election that the party would win 67 percent of votes, but noted that the margin of error in its polling showed the figure could vary between 65.34 percent and 68.66 percent. The predictions of analysts on South Africa's television and radio stations on Thursday were close to this range.
The company, Ipsos-Markinor, said that traditionally the ANC benefited from a high turnout and drew substantial support from voters who decided to vote at the last minute.
Figures from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) published at 5.30 pm showed that 8.3 million votes had been counted, comprising 36 percent of the total.
The ANC had won 5.5 million votes, the DA 1.3 million (16 percent of the vote) and COPE about 651,000 (7.9 percent). Although opinion polls had predicted COPE would run in third place behind the DA – which has its origins in a white liberal opposition party under apartheid, COPE's leaders had hoped to do better. However, they responded to the results with a brave face, suggesting they had done well for a party launched four months ago.
The IEC says 23 million South Africans registered for the national and provincial elections, which were held on the same day.
In the provinces, the DA is set to wrest control of the Western Cape, centred on Cape Town, from the ANC. The Western Cape region of the ANC has been in disarray in recent years, suffering from internal splits which are to some degree based on racial lines. The province differs from the rest of the country in having a large number of voters classified under apartheid as "coloured" – usually of mixed race or Malay heritage.
A pre-election Ipsos-Markinor poll showed ANC support in the region as having plunged from 45 percent to 22 percent in the five years since the last election. At 4.30pm on Thursday, the DA had won half the votes counted, against the ANC's 31 percent share. COPE was far behind, with eight percent.
In some other provinces, COPE was doing better than the DA on Thursday afternoon, although it was being thoroughly defeated by the ANC.
In Limpopo in the far north of South Africa, COPE seemed likely to become the official opposition to the ANC, albeit with only seven percent of the vote. (The ANC had won 85 percent in the province at 3.30pm.)
In the ANC stronghold of the Eastern Cape, the ancestral home of party leaders over the last 40 years, COPE was winning 13 percent of the vote at 4.30pm, against 69 percent for the ANC. COPE was faring better in the Northern Cape, with 17 percent against the ANC's 59 percent.
The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was running fourth in the national election results at 5.30pm, with 265,370 votes or 3.2 percent of the total. A little earlier, the count from Buthelezi's home province of KwaZulu-Natal showed that the ANC was drawing 61 percent of the vote and the IFP 24 percent.
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Pre-election polls had predicted that the IFP would suffer as calamitous a decline in KwaZulu-Natal as the ANC in the Western Cape. Ipsos-Markinor polling suggested IFP support would drop from 37 percent in 2004 to eight percent in this election.
In the past, Buthelezi has looked to Zulu traditionalists in rural areas for the bulk of his support in the province. However, the election of Jacob Zuma as the first ANC leader from KwaZulu-Natal since Chief Albert Luthuli, the 1960 Nobel Peace laureate, has stirred regional and ethnic pride.
When COPE founder Mosiuoa Lekota was still an ANC leader in 2007, he triggered bitter attacks from Zuma supporters for criticizing as tribalist the wearing of T-shirts describing Zuma as "100% Zuluboy". Lekota was voted out of office as ANC party chairman soon afterwards.
