DA candidate Trollip, a fluent speaker of the local Xhosa language, is likely to become mayor of the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality after his party won 47 percent of the vote against the ANC’s 41 percent, down from 52 percent five years ago.
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After two decades of political dominance, the historic ANC liberation movement once led by Nelson Mandela was also at risk of losing its majority in the capital Pretoria and the economic metropole Johannesburg, where the results were still too close to call.
With the Democratic Alliance strengthening its hold on Cape Town, the ruling party now controls only three of the country’s eight metropolitan areas.
The Democratic Alliance, which has roots in the anti-apartheid movement and had a white party leader until previous year, won Nelson Mandela Bay after fielding a white candidate for mayor.
The ANC has lost some support from people, notably in urban areas, who say their hopes for economic opportunities have not been fulfilled since the end of white minority rule. “South Africa’s municipal election results bring a new dawn of coalitions at the local level that will alter the shape of politics in the long term”, Augustine Booth-Clibborn, an analyst at Africa Risk Consulting, said by e-mail.
With 99.9 per cent of the vote in on Saturday, the ANC secured 54.4 per cent support in an August 3 local government election, slipping below the 60 per cent mark for the first time since it took power in 1994.
As of Friday afternoon, with more than 99 percent of ballots counted, the African National Congress (ANC) has maintained a slim lead of about 54 percent of the vote following Wednesday’s municipal elections.
Malema and DA leader Mmusi Maimane, the first black leader of a party traditionally seen as the political home of wealthy whites, have ruled out any chance of doing a deal with the ANC.
WATCH: Is Zuma turning South Africa into a “mafia state”? . The party, which advocates the nationalisation of industry and other measures it says will help the poor, has garnered nearly eight percent of the vote nationwide. Zuma’s office said Saturday that he would attend the announcement of the final election results.
The ANC said in a statement Friday that it will reflect on where its support fell, but added defiantly, “As results continue to come in, ANC votes are expected to increase even further”.
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“Mandela promoted “non-racial” politics and the ANC has just gone in reverse in a desperate attempt to keep votes”. The South African economy has stagnated since the global financial crisis in 2008, and the World Bank says the country has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world. The Constitutional Court recently said Zuma violated the constitution and instructed the president to reimburse the state $507,000.
