Turnout: 58.64%
About this election
The South African general election of 29 May 2024 was the most consequential since the end of apartheid. For the first time since the country's first democratic vote in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) — the liberation movement of Nelson Mandela that had governed for three decades — lost its parliamentary majority. The ANC fell to 40.18% of the National Assembly vote and 159 of the 400 seats, a collapse of more than seventeen points from 2019 that forced it into a coalition for the first time in its history. The result ended an era of one-party dominance and opened a new, more competitive chapter in South African politics.
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.
The vote took place amid deep public frustration over rolling electricity blackouts ("load-shedding"), record unemployment of around a third of the workforce, water shortages, collapsing municipal services and persistent corruption exposed by the Zondo Commission into "state capture" during Jacob Zuma's presidency. President Cyril Ramaphosa led the ANC, promising renewal but burdened by the party's record in office. The official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), led by John Steenhuisen, assembled a "Multi-Party Charter" of smaller parties hoping to unseat the ANC. The decisive new factor was the launch in December 2023 of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a party named after the ANC's old armed wing and fronted by former president Jacob Zuma, who had fallen out bitterly with Ramaphosa. MK drew heavily on Zuma's base in KwaZulu-Natal. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of Julius Malema campaigned on land expropriation and nationalisation.
The ANC took 6,459,683 votes (40.18%, 159 seats). The DA finished second on 21.81% and 87 seats, broadly holding its ground. The sensation was MK, which on its debut won 14.58% and 58 seats — overtaking the EFF, which slipped to 9.52% and 39 seats. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) recovered to 3.85% (17 seats), the Patriotic Alliance won 2.06% (9), and a long tail of parties including the Freedom Front Plus, ActionSA, the ACDP and the new RISE Mzansi and Build One South Africa shared the remainder. Turnout was 58.64% of 27.8 million registered voters, continuing a long decline. Provincially, MK seized KwaZulu-Natal — gutting the ANC's old stronghold — while the DA again won the Western Cape outright and the ANC led the other seven provinces, though it fell below 50% in the economic heartland of Gauteng.
With no party near a majority, the ANC negotiated a Government of National Unity (GNU). On 14 June 2024 the National Assembly re-elected Cyril Ramaphosa as president with the backing of the DA, the IFP, the Patriotic Alliance and several smaller parties — an extraordinary pact between the former liberation movement and its historic liberal opposition. MK and the EFF refused to join and went into opposition. The GNU represented a peaceful, negotiated transfer away from single-party rule and a test of whether ideologically distant partners could govern Africa's most industrialised economy together.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.