There was a time when almost 70 percent of South Africans rallied behind the African National Congress, the ANC, which had gone from being an outlawed opposition movement to a state-bearing party with a sweeping reform agenda.
More than 20 years have passed since the ANC's peak of 70 percent in the 2004 election. After this week's local elections, it is now clear that the ANC received just over 30 percent of the votes in the national tally. The liberal-conservative Democratic Alliance is now the largest party in most of the country's major cities.
In Johannesburg, the city where the final battle over apartheid began in the 1970s and was largely played out for decades to come, only one in five residents vote for the ANC today.
A number of factors are behind the dismal performance of the ANC, whose voter support over the last few elections resembles a steep slide.
• The ANC faces the same challenges as major parties in other parts of the world, struggling to remain relevant to large constituencies in an increasingly fragmented political landscape. It is a development that the ANC is not proud of, but it is reinforced by the ideological frictions that have existed since the party, before democratization in 1994, got ready to rule South Africa.
It was then that Nelson Mandela negotiated a compromise solution with the apartheid regime, which meant that the white minority population would sit undisturbed - their assets would not be touched, despite the country having the highest income gaps in the world. A number of ANC members turned against this concession.
As impatience grew, Mandela's compromise began to be openly questioned within the ANC. This battle between radicals and pragmatists was won by the latter, at a high price. In 2013, the radical youth leader Julius Malema started his own party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, EFF, and brought with him a large part of the ANC's future talent. The remnants of the ANC were decimated again ten years later when former president Jacob Zuma broke away and created the MK party out of the populist left wing of the ANC.
• Liberation movements tend to be very bad at governing. The qualities that create a successful liberation movement under oppression are often completely different qualities than those required to rule a country. In the local elections, where the substantive issues have come into focus, ANC representatives have been laughed at during the election campaign.
When the liberation movements take over power, expectations of reward arise which create fertile ground for corruption. If you look outside the region, you can see that the ANC's sister organizations in neighboring countries are in the same bad condition, if not worse, and often only maintain power by increasing the level of repression.
In South Africa, Mandela and the other fathers of the country were aware of this risk. It was a contributing reason why they put so much effort into building a robust constitution – to protect the country against a future ANC with the wrong values. President Cyril Ramaphosa was himself involved in the work on the constitution. At the moment, he doesn't even seem to be trying to grow the ANC's voter base, instead focusing on dismantling the ANC's hold on power in an orderly manner, which is to his credit. Despite the ANC being in such a precarious situation, there are no signs that the party would seek to disrupt the democratic process.
• In addition, voters are changing. The ANC lives in the past and has failed to articulate any future vision for the country's youth. The "Born Free" generation - those born after the 1994 democratization - is heading towards middle age. The first-time voters in this year's election were born in 2008. They are not motivated by efforts that the party made 40 years ago.
Political scientist and ANC expert William Gumede sees this year's election as historic as it is the first election where black voters have seriously broken away and stopped voting for parties that claim to represent them specifically.
- Despite everything that happened in the past, and all the talk about the Democratic Alliance being a party for rich whites, black voters are ready to vote for them. What the ANC has left are elderly rural voters who are grateful to receive their pension or welfare once a month. This generation will die out soon, he explains to DN.
Which means that even if 31 percent still looks like a decent number, the loss at the next election could be even more brutal.
