South Africa's ANC on course to lose majority after watershed vote

South Africa's ruling ANC was on course to lose its 30-year-old unchallenged majority after voters queued long into the night to cast their ballots, preliminary results and projections showed.

With a fifth of votes tallied on Thursday, the ANC was leading but with a score of 44 percent well down on the 57 percent it won in 2019 followed by the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) at 25 percent, according to authorities.

The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was in third place with nine percent of the vote, trailed by former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) on eight.

"The broad church of the ANC has taken a substantial knock. This is a shock to the system for the ANC and ultimately will also be a shock to the system for the average South African, who has only known ANC rule since 1994," said political analyst Daniel Silke.

"It redraws the political boundaries of South Africa and creates a degree of uncertainty".

Coalition partners

If President Cyril Ramaphosa's party is confirmed as dropping below 50 percent, it would force him to seek coalition partners to be re-elected to form a new government. That would be a historic evolution in the country's democratic journey, which was underlined by newspaper headlines on Thursday.

The party remains respected for its leading role in overthrowing white minority rule, and its progressive social welfare and black economic empowerment policies are credited by supporters with helping millions of black families out of poverty.

But over three decades of almost unchallenged rule, its leadership has been implicated in a series of large-scale corruption scandals, while the continent's most industrialised economy has languished and crime and unemployment figures have hit record highs.

"Zuma ran this country perfectly so let's put him back and let South Africa run again," Don Naidoo, a middle-aged small business owner from the province's largest city of Durban, told AFP.

If the ANC gets close to 50 percent it could shore up a majority by allying itself with some of the four dozen smaller and regional parties contesting the election. But this appeared increasingly unlikely.

A projection by the respected Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), showed it was in line to win less than 42 percent, a share that could force it to partner with a bigger rival. Yet, experts were split on who the ANC would prefer as bedfellows and on whether the poor performance threatened Ramaphosa's leadership.