South Africa’s (SA) African National Congress (ANC) is on track for a big drop in voter support in municipal elections, results from \u200bmore than two-thirds of the votes counted showed this Friday.<\/p>\n
The results \u200cso far suggest coalition talks will decide control of major cities such as Johannesburg, extending the decline of the previously dominant party, which had to form a coalition \u200bto govern nationally after the 2024 election.<\/p>\n
The ANC was on \u200b32% of the vote, compared to 25% for its nearest rival, \u2060the Democratic Alliance (DA) results from 71% of votes counted showed.<\/p>\n
If those \u200bfigures hold the ANC would be down about 14 percentage points from its \u200blast municipal election result in 2021, which was already its worst in history.<\/p>\n
The ANC has been SA’s largest party since it led the country out of apartheid \u200bin 1994, but its share of the vote has fallen sharply as \u200bvoters have punished it for high crime and unemployment, corruption scandals and failing basic \u200cservices \u2060like water and electricity.<\/p>\n
The DA is on course to win an outright majority in Cape Town, but projections are for hung councils in other large metropolitan areas, such as Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, and Tshwane, home \u200bto the administrative \u200bcapital Pretoria.<\/p>\n
The outcome \u2060remains unclear in the early stages of the vote count in eThekwini, the municipality centred on Durban, where former \u200bPresident Jacob Zuma is hoping his party, a splinter \u200bfrom the \u2060ANC can seize a majority.<\/p>\n
–Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":43484,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-50158","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The ANC was on \u200b32% of the vote, compared to 25% for its nearest rival, \u2060the Democratic Alliance (DA) results from 71% of votes counted showed.","published_date":"","news_description":"The ANC was on \u200b32% of the vote, compared to 25% for its nearest rival, \u2060the Democratic Alliance (DA) results from 71% of votes counted showed.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/50158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/50158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50160,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/50158\/revisions\/50160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=50158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}