With the picture of electoral results beginning to emerge into crisper focus on Thursday night, little wonder that some of South Africa's smaller parties were demanding a re-run of elections. It is now all but certain that a number of the 2019 elections' most colourful and divisive characters are out for the count, politically speaking -- at least for this election cycle.

Daily Maverick's Stephen Grootes recently joked that if there was any justice in the universe, the South African Capitalist Party (ZACP) and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party (SRWP) would end up having to sit next to each other in the parliamentary pews of the National Assembly.

With 68% of voting stations' ballots counted on Thursday night, that dream was dying a slow death.

It was all but certain that the ZACP would fail to reach the threshold of about 46,000 votes required for one National Assembly seat, while hopes were similarly fading for the union-founded SRWP.

The "purple cow" capitalists were always unlikely to win back their R200,000 electoral deposit, having been launched about six weeks before the elections with no existing political infrastructure to draw from. The ZACP had focused its campaigning on suburban Johannesburg -- where...