Frustrated South Africa Wonders if ANC Is Still Worth It

Pretoria values its ties with Moscow in part because the Soviet Union backed the struggle against the white supremacist apartheid regime, which the United States often supported until the mid-1980s. Now, U.S. officials are engaged in hectic backchannel diplomacy to mend relations with South Africa and make the case for supporting Kyiv, FP’s Robbie Gramer revealed in an exclusive report last July.

Elections to Watch in 2024: This story is part of a package on 15 key elections this year (besides the United States). Read the full analysis here. 

But war in Ukraine feels far off for many in South Africa—and not just because of geography or historical affinities. South Africans have more than enough domestic concerns of their own.

Three decades after the end of apartheid, the country remains deeply divided along racial and economic lines. As of 2022, South Africa was the most unequal society in the world. In an April 2023 episode of Ones and Tooze, FP’s Adam Tooze described seeing, during his travels to South Africa, “a situation so incongruous that it creates a sort of slightly surreal impression.” Overall unemployment in the country currently stands at 33 percent—and 61 percent for those aged 15 to 24. But as Tooze noted, “[i]t’s the Black population that suffers the crushing levels of unemployment.” Crime is also mounting, according to authorities.

Some South Africans have turned to blaming foreigners from elsewhere in Africa for their malaise—fueling growing xenophobia in what was once affectionately known as the “Rainbow Nation.” That’s having an impact on politics: “[L]oath to alienate a large part of the electorate, the government has been slow to condemn xenophobia, with some ministers openly espousing it themselves,” journalist Kate Bartlett wrote in Foreign Policy in July 2022, profiling a provocateur she called “South Africa’s Donald Trump.”

South Africans also feel left in the dark by their government—literally. Rolling blackouts are now a routine feature of daily life amid an energy shortage and dysfunction at national utility company Eskom, FP’s Anusha Rathi explained in July 2022. The crisis is “part of a growing list of promises that the African National Congress [ANC] party has failed to deliver on,” she wrote.

This year, the ANC will face its biggest test yet in national legislative elections, which are expected to be held between May and August, according to authorities. As South Africa’s party of liberation, the social democratic ANC has held power uninterrupted since the country’s 1994 transition to democracy, always winning a majority of seats in the National Assembly—the country’s lower house of parliament—to avoid a coalition government. But its grip is waning. An October 2023 poll by the Social Research Foundation saw the ANC’s support dip to 45 percent. The party is currently led by President Cyril Ramaphosa. (Unlike most other parliamentary systems, which appoint a prime minister, South Africa’s victorious party selects a president—who is both head of state and head of government.)

Many voters increasingly associate the ANC with corruption. No ANC leader helped fuel this trend more than former President Jacob Zuma, who served from 2009 to 2018 and whose “grand theft of public resources was labeled ‘state capture,’” the late analyst Eusebius McKaiser wrote in Foreign Policy in July 2021, after Zuma’s arrest. But Ramaphosa later pardoned Zuma—and then became ensnared in a graft scandal of his own, known as “Farmgate.”

Despite the ANC’s waning support, it’s hard to imagine another party running things in Pretoria. The ANC’s chief rival is the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), a big-tent centrist party led by legislator John Steenhuisen. Steenhuisen has formed what he calls a “Moonshot Pact” with six smaller parties in an attempt to oust the ANC. “Just as with the original Moonshot … there were a lot of naysayers,” Steenhuisen said when announcing his new group in August 2023.

Analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera are among them: While the DA is certainly more prominent than ever before, it still registers far lower than the ANC in polling and has a smaller grassroots base. A coalition as varied as Moonshot also risks splintering. And there is the fact that Steenhuisen, while heading a multiracial party, is himself white. Many Black politicians have left the DA in recent years for a variety of reasons, which has not helped bolster its image as an inclusive institution.

With poll numbers below 50 percent, the ANC could try to form a coalition with the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF)—the third-largest party in Parliament behind the ANC and DA—though the idea is contentious. The Marxist-Leninist EFF has long been controversial, particularly in its advocacy of land expropriation. Last summer, the party also became the subject of a global smear campaign after Elon Musk tweeted a video of the EFF’s leader chanting “kill the Boer,” an anti-apartheid slogan that Musk—who is South African—claimed was a call for the “genocide of white people in South Africa.”

When elections are held, South Africans will elect 400 members to the country’s National Assembly for five-year terms via party-list proportional representation. Last year, Ramaphosa also signed into law a bill that allows independent candidates—and not just those who belong to political parties—to stand in elections. Voters will also select members of their provincial parliaments.

Analysts expect turnout to be low, especially among younger voters, given widespread political apathy. Turnout during the last national elections in 2019 was around 66 percent. Only 17 percent of registered voters are under 30, according to authorities, despite the country’s median age of 27.6.

John McDermott, the Economist’s Cape Town correspondent, expects the ANC will be able to eke out another victory—if only due to the lack of good alternatives. But, McDermott warned, this could be the party’s “last triumph.” Born out of a 20th-century struggle, the ANC will need to adjust to 21st-century realities if it is to continue earning voters’ trust.