The ANC opens unprecedented coalition talks after its historic debacle in the South African elections

June 1 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The African National Congress (ANC), the historic party of the South African Government, has already opened talks with the country’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, with a view to creating an unprecedented coalition government after the debacle of the ruling party in the elections this week, where it has lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 30 years of South African democratic history.

While waiting for the Electoral Commission to declare the final results on Sunday night, the ANC enters the final phase of the count with 40 percent of the national vote, a result that has left party leaders “dismayed.” as the senior official of the organization Obed Bapela has acknowledged to the British network BBC.

The ANC has lost almost 20 percentage points since the previous elections in 2019, which it won without problems with 57 percent of the vote. The economic crisis, the erosion of the figure of the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and the emergence of “the new kids on the block”, as Bapela described the uMkhonto weSizwe party of former president Jacob Zuma – the first South African party to exceed two million votes in its electoral debut –, have harshly punished the party at the polls.

Sources from the ANC and the Democratic Alliance have confirmed to the News24 portal the opening of “multiple communication channels between both parties”, whose collaboration would guarantee a majority coalition thanks to the provisional 21 percent obtained for now by the formation led by John Steenhuisen, a party closely linked to the economic elites and exponent of the country’s white minority.

“Elections in South Africa today are no longer won with the credit obtained with the end of apartheid,” said Bapela in relation to the segregationist movement that came to an end in 1994 with the victory of Nelson Mandela’s ANC. “They win by convincing the voters, because they have been the ones, discouraged by the strike and the lack of electricity, who have come out to vote against this party,” he added.