South Africa General election 2024 — Results
Election day: May 29, 2024
- African National Congress (ANC): 40.18%, 159 seats
- Democratic Alliance (DA): 21.81%, 87 seats
- uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK): 14.58%, 58 seats
- Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF): 9.52%, 39 seats
- Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP): 3.85%, 17 seats
- Patriotic Alliance (PA): 2.06%, 9 seats
- Freedom Front Plus (VF+): 1.36%, 6 seats
- ActionSA: 1.20%, 6 seats
Turnout: 58.64%
About this election
How the vote works
South Africa is a parliamentary republic with a closed-list proportional representation system widely regarded as one of the purest in the world. Voters do not elect a president directly: they choose a 400-member National Assembly, which in turn elects the head of state at its first sitting. Of the 400 seats, 200 are filled from a single national party list and 200 from nine regional (provincial) lists, with seats allocated by the largest-remainder (Droop quota) method so that a party's share of seats closely tracks its share of the vote — there is no electoral threshold. The 2024 election was the first held under the Electoral Amendment Act of 2023, which for the first time allowed independent candidates to contest National Assembly and provincial seats, a change prompted by a 2020 Constitutional Court ruling. Elections are run by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), and the same ballot day also renews all nine provincial legislatures.
Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.
In numbers
- 18.37 points separated African National Congress (ANC) from Democratic Alliance (DA) — 2,953,948 votes.
- African National Congress (ANC) took 40.18% of the vote and 39.75% of the seats (159 of 400) — almost exactly proportional.
- The top two shared 61.99% of the vote between them, and 4 lists cleared 5%.
- African National Congress (ANC) moved −17.32 points against the 2019 general election (57.50% → 40.18%).
- Turnout of 58.64% is the lowest 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
- Why Official Results Sometimes Take Weeks — the stages between the count and the legal result
- Why Turnout Figures Disagree — why two sources publish different turnout for one election
- D’Hondt vs Sainte-Laguë — how a divisor formula turns vote shares into seats