Ruling African National Congress party faces challenge from centrist and far-left parties in nationwide vote.
Voting stations have closed following South Africa’s general election on Wednesday, 25 years after the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy.
Provisional polling numbers will arrive by Thursday afternoon local time, according to Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) officials, with final results due to be announced on Saturday; South Africa’s new president will be inaugurated on May 25.
This is the most hotly contested election in South African history, with a record 48 parties on the ballot, 19 more than last time around and nearly double the number that took part in the 1994 elections.
Pre-vote polls predicted that the ANC will win between 55 and 62 percent of the vote, while the centrist Democratic Alliance (DA) was predicted to get approximately 20 percent and the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) between 10 and 14 percent.
The leaders of all three major political parties cast their votes during the course of Wednesday morning.
ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa and DA head Mmusi Maimane both visited polling stations in the Johannesburg township of Soweto, an important site of resistance during the apartheid era, and former home to many prominent liberation icons. The EFF’s firebrand leader, Julius Malema,
voted in his home province of Limpopo.
“This is a vote that reminds us of 1994,” Ramaphosa told media at the polling station. “Our people were just as excited as this because they were heralding a new period, a new future for our country. And today, this is what I am also picking up.”
Against a backdrop of economic crises, spiralling crime, poor service delivery, widespread unemployment and rampant corruption, the ruling ANC hopes to bounce back from an unprecedentedly poor performance in 2016 local elections, when it ceded control of key cities to the DA.
The run-up to today’s vote was characterised by widespread service delivery protests across South Africa, which have drawn the extent likely winner Ramaphosa’s task into sharp focus. He will also have to overcome deep-set factionalism within his own party.
