South Africa’s ANC Is Humbled by Its Worst Election Results

South Africa’s African National Congress party faced its worst election results ever Sunday and a new low point on its gradual decline in popularity as voters rebuked it for a failure to deliver basic services like water and electricity in towns and cities.

The once-dominant ANC — the party of Nelson Mandela — had received around 30% of the vote in Wednesday’s local government elections with 99% of ballots counted. The final results were expected late on Sunday, according to the Independent Electoral Commission.

The ANC remained the largest party by total share in an election involving hundreds of parties, but the Democratic Alliance that is its main opposition had received around 25% of votes in the near-complete count.

That brought closer to reality the once-unthinkable notion that the ANC that led South Africa out of the white minority rule of apartheid and delivered freedom in 1994 under Mandela might one day not be its biggest party. It used to command 70% of the vote.

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The ANC was on course Sunday for a steep drop of about 15 percentage points from the last local elections and the loss of approximately one-third of its support from five years ago.

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But while the ANC’s popularity has dropped sharply, no single party has overtaken it as the vote has fragmented among many parties on a local and national scale.

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Voters across South Africa have long expressed frustration over failed public services that have left many cities and towns with regular water and electricity outages, broken roads and streetlights, and uncollected refuse.

Those local government failures, along with long-held anger over corruption scandals connected to the ANC, largely were the key issues in this election. The election was to choose local government councilors that run South Africa’s eight biggest cities, as well as its 44 district and 205 local municipalities.

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