The Long Decline of South Africa's ANC

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Three decades after the African National Congress (ANC) won 62.7 percent of the vote that propelled Nelson Mandela into the presidency in 1994, the ANC's vote share plummeted to 40.2 percent of the national vote in South Africa's 2024 general election (down from 57.5 percent five years previously,= and well below the 50 percent predicted by preelection polls). Against thirty years of pessimistic academic literature predicting the opposite, the ANC accepted electoral defeat. But this left the ANC in a strategic quandary. Had it reached the upper 40 percent range, easy coalitions with small parties would have passed the 50 percent threshold. But with only 40 percent, the party reached back into the early years of democracy and formed a government of national unity—a multiparty coalition that left the ANC's most significant political opponents out in the cold. ANC (and national) president Cyril Ramaphosa has sidelined Africanist parties and created a coalition with decidedly centrist parties. The "broad church" which has bedeviled the ANC is at an end. Multiparty coalition government has arrived in South Africa, but questions remain: Can ANC electoral decline be arrested by this sharp move towards the center? And what, if any, substantive role is there for the ANC in the future if not?