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The vote counting continues in South Africa. A few things are clear: The African National Congress is going to win the election and it is going to win handily. It may well end up with the required 2/3 of the vote to allow the party to amend the constitution on its own, though the numbers indicate that it will be close. Less than 50% of the votes have been counted, so there is plenty of room for changes. The challenge posed by the Congress of the People (COPE), meanwhile, faded, though the party has the foundation to move forward if it chooses to. Nonetheless, the Democratic Alliance (DA) appears to have gained ground, leaving me stunned. I assumed that COPE would do the most damage to the DA and would become the official opposition.
So how is it possible mathematically that the ANC could still comfortably in the mid-60% range with the DA strengthening its position from five years ago and COPE presenting itself as a potential future force? Because it appears that this election will mark something of atectonic shift whereby smaller parties will fall by the wayside, and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has continued its path to obsolescence, a process that accelerated in this election with the ANC and Jacob Zuma taking Zulu votes from IFP, whose only rationale has been as an ethnic nationalist party as it was. Smaller parties will continue to struggle along on one-issue platforms and narrow agendas borne of grievances, but the new reality appears to be that South Africa is going to be a three-party state, assuming that COPE and DA do not merge or that COPE was not a one-election wonder that falls apart now that its pretensions to power are lost.
There is still ample time for the vote counting to play out. And once it does I will write Part II (see Part I here) of my analysis of the elections in which I hope to show that it is easier to assess and analyze what has happened than to predict what will!
