The DA, which previous year elected its first black leader Mmusi Maimane, was ahead in Johannesburg and in Nelson Mandela Bay, the area named after the anti-apartheid hero who led the ANC to power and which includes the city of Port Elizabeth.
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The ANC has won more than 60 percent of the vote at every election since the country’s first multi-racial vote in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was sworn in as president.
South Africans voted on Wednesday in closely contested municipal elections that could deal a heavy blow to the African National Congress (ANC), which has ruled since leading the struggle to end apartheid. The DA already runs Cape Town, the only major South African city where blacks are not in the majority, and has been pushing hard to win supporters in other regions. The party so far has received 54 percent of votes across the country, its lowest percentage ever, with the Democratic Alliance getting 26 percent.
“It is clear that South African voters have identified strongly with the DA”.
The vote is still neck and neck in the three hotly contested battleground areas of Johannesburg and Tshwane in Gauteng and the Nelson Mandela Bay metro in the Eastern Cape, where the DA seemed to have an upper hand.
Ratings agency Fitch said in a statement that although the results may weaken Zuma, the president has built a strong network of support in the ANC’s upper echelons “and there have been no clear signs that a majority of leaders could withdraw their support before the ANC conference in December 2017”.
“What it really will say is that few results are certain in South African politics any more, that the certainty the ANC has enjoyed for so long would simply be negated”.
The capital Pretoria and the economic hub Johannesburg were a close fight between the DA and the ANC.
Shockwaves reverberated across the country when results of Nkandla, Zuma’s rural area and where he voted, showed that the ANC had lost the ward to IFP.
South Africa’s electoral commission said late Wednesday voting had proceeded smoothly and without major incident.
“Since President Zuma has been in power the reform process has been nearly non-existent”, said Lars Peter Nielsen, a senior money manager at Kolding, Denmark-based Global Evolution A/S, which oversees $2.5 billion. As you can see, we are standing at over 50%.
The Economic Freedom Fighters party, that appeals to young Black militants-many too young to remember apartheid-is led by the charismatic Julius Malema, a former ally of Zuma and expelled leader of the ANC youth wing.
The municipal vote comes as Africa’s most industrialised country teeters on the edge of a recession after a string of corruption scandals surrounding Zuma.
Many South Africans who queued up to vote across the country said they were anxious about Zuma’s performance and the state of the economy, where one in four in the labour force is unemployed.
This year the nation’s highest court said he breached the constitution by refusing to pay back taxpayer money spent on his private home while another court said the decision by state prosecutors to drop corruption charges against him weeks before he became president in 2009 was irrational.
“The election is a referendum on President Zuma to a certain extent”, Besseling said by phone from Johannesburg.
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In December, his decision to dismiss the country’s respected finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, and replace him with a largely unknown and widely denounced Parliamentarian, sent the country’s rand currency to all-time lows against the USA dollar and British pound.
