AZANIA/SOUTH AFRICA Black Voters Punish the ANC
One of the key lessons from the 8 May General Elections was that the ANC, which has been in power since 1994 in alliance with the Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation, has lost 1.4 million votes [1]. This was the ANC’s lowest vote share since 1994; it lost votes in every province. The votes that were lost did not go to the main party defending the white capitalist minority, the Democratic Alliance, which itself lost 470,000 votes. So what happened to the 1.4 million voters who defected from the ANC? In a country where the Black majority won the right to vote through bloodshed, barely 25 years ago, a large number did not turn out. Almost 10 million voting-age citizens did not register. The number of people who did not vote has also gone up. Those who did not register and did not vote are mostly the youth who live in the townships [the suburban areas earmarked for Black people during Apartheid Ed. Note] and informal settlements The Economic Freedom [...]