Results particularly worth noting after our 6th national and provincial elections.

  • This is the worst ever result for the African National Congress (ANC), with only 57.5% of the vote.
  • The Democratic Alliance (DA) retains its position as the biggest opposition party, with 20.8% of the vote, but this is a decline from 22.2%. It won over four million votes in 2014, but in this election it managed just over 3.6 million votes.
  • The Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) both had their best ever elections. In its second national election, the EFF won 10.8% of the vote (up from 6.4% in 2014). The FF+ managed 2.4%. The only other time it won more than two percent of the national vote was in 1994, when it secured 2.1%.
  • This is only the second time since 1994 that three parties have won more than ten percent of the vote. In 1994, the ANC, National Party, and Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) all won more than ten percent nationally.
  • This is the lowest turnout ever in a post-apartheid national election. Only 66% of registered voters made their mark on election day.
  • There will be three newcomers in this Parliament – the African Transformation Movement, the GOOD Party, and Al-Jama-ah. Agang SA and the African People’s Convention both did not manage to secure enough votes to make it back to Parliament.
  • The ANC was the biggest party in eight of the nine provinces, coming second in the Western Cape, with 28.6%, its worst ever result there.
  • The DA won the Western Cape, managing 55.5% of the vote. The DA emerged as the second-biggest party in the Eastern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, and Northern Cape. Its support dropped in six of the nine provinces, managing an uptick in only the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Northern Cape.
  • The EFF is the official opposition in Mpumalanga, North West, and Limpopo. Its best provincial result was in North West, where it won 18.6% of the provincial vote.
  • KwaZulu-Natal is the only province where the top three is not made up of the ANC, EFF, or DA. Here the IFP was the second biggest party, with 16.3%. The ANC was the biggest party with 54.2% of the vote, while the DA was third with 13.9% (its best ever result in the province).
  • Limpopo was the province that backed the ANC the most. Here, the governing party won over three-quarters of the vote (although it is still the party’s worst ever result in the province).
  • The party that secured the lowest number of votes was the National People’s Ambassadors, which won 1 979 votes.

Marius Roodt is Head of Campaigns at the IRR.

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Marius Roodt is currently deputy editor of the Daily Friend and also consults on IRR campaigns. This is his second stint at the Institute, having returned after spells working at the Centre for Development and Enterprise and a Johannesburg-based management consultancy. He has also previously worked as a journalist, an analyst for a number of foreign governments, and spent most of 2005 and 2006 driving a scooter around London. Roodt holds an honours degree from the Rand Afrikaans University (now the University of Johannesburg) and an MA in Political Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand.