South Africa General election 2019 — Results
Election day: May 8, 2019
- African National Congress (ANC): 57.50%, 230 seats
- Democratic Alliance (DA): 20.77%, 84 seats
- Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF): 10.80%, 44 seats
- Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP): 3.38%, 14 seats
- Freedom Front Plus (VF+): 2.38%, 10 seats
- African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP): 0.84%, 4 seats
- Others (8 parties): 2.56%, 14 seats
Turnout: 66.05%
About this election
How the vote works
South Africa uses closed-list proportional representation to elect its 400-member National Assembly, which then chooses the president. Half the seats are allocated from a national list and half from nine provincial lists, using the largest-remainder method with no minimum threshold, so even very small parties can win a seat. The same day, voters also elect the nine provincial legislatures on a separate ballot. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) administers the process. Because the president is elected by parliament rather than directly, a party's National Assembly share is the single most important number in South African politics — and in every election from 1994 to 2019 that share belonged, by an absolute majority, to the ANC.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 36.73 points separated African National Congress (ANC) from Democratic Alliance (DA) — 6,403,944 votes.
- African National Congress (ANC) took 57.50% of the vote and 57.50% of the seats (230 of 400) — almost exactly proportional.
- The top two shared 78.27% of the vote between them, and 3 lists cleared 5%.
- Turnout of 66.05% is the highest of the 2 general elections covered here since 2019.
Calculated from the official figures on this page and from the other elections of this type in our archive.
Understanding this election
- How We Check an Election Figure — the checks every number passes before publication
- How Live Election Data Is Collected and Verified — from ballot box to published figure
- Why Official Results Sometimes Take Weeks — the stages between the count and the legal result