New party put brakes on landslide

The African National Congress stormed to a fourth successive landslide victory in election results announced yesterday, but stopped short of maintaining its coveted two-thirds majority in the South African Parliament.

Spokeswoman Jessie Duarte said the ANC's 65.9 per cent share of the vote - its lowest since 1994 - represented an "emphatic mandate" for party leader Jacob Zuma, ahead of his inauguration as president next month.

The main Opposition hailed a victory for democracy as the ruling party lost its parliamentary power to change the constitution without challenge.

Final results were released by the Independent Electoral Commission in Pretoria at the end of a process delayed because the 17 million South Africans who voted last week - a 77.3 per cent turnout - were allowed to cast their ballots in any polling station.

The ANC's loss of its two-thirds majority was a triumph for the Congress of the People (Cope) party, created four months ago.

Cope, whose supporters are close to former President Thabo Mbeki, Zuma's arch-rival, scored only 7.42 per cent in the national poll, but the party's presence on the ballot paper achieved its aim of undermining the dominance of the ANC among black voters.

The biggest setback for the ANC was the loss of the Western Cape, where it won only 31.6 per cent of the vote against 46 per cent in 2004, marking the first time the ruling party has been ousted from provincial government at the polls.

The Democratic Alliance won an absolute majority in the Western Cape with 51.3 per cent of the vote, nearly double its score in 2004.

Fighting her way through 300 well-wishers after flying back from the counting centre in Pretoria, Helen Zille, the Mayor of Cape Town and DA leader, claimed to be at the vanguard of multi-partyism in South Africa.

"The Western Cape is leading South Africa towards democracy," she said. "The voters here have shown the nation that democracy is not just about the right for everybody to vote, but about the regular change of government through the ballot box."

Zille, who will become Premier of the Western Cape province, said the first victory for the Opposition would be to block Amendment 17, a constitutional change to limit local authorities' revenue-raising powers, which was put before the Cabinet shortly before the election. The DA, which won 16.6 per cent of the vote nationally, also hopes for support from other Opposition parties to prevent the ANC from managing the judiciary to its advantage.

The party claims the national prosecutor bowed to ANC pressure when it withdrew a corruption case against Zuma three weeks ago.

The Western Cape, the country's richest province, has always been different because of its racial make-up: 4.2 million people are classed as "coloured" - a painful mixed-race label that goes back generations - against about 1.2 million black and one million white.

But Zille, a 58-year-old former anti-apartheid activist, claims the DA's breakthrough is much more than a demographic assertion.

"The DA is the most non-racial party in South Africa," she insisted, "and the magnificent thing is that the voters of the Western Cape have led the way in the crusade against identity politics."

Zille, a former journalist who had to leave the profession in 1977 after co-authoring a scoop that exposed the apartheid regime's role in the death of struggle hero Steve Biko, is the biggest thorn in the ANC leadership's side.

She is not humble, and yesterday claimed a Barack Obama-like victory in her crusade against identity politics, an apartheid invention that lives on through the ANC's incessant references to race.

She said: "In the DA we have crossed all the racial boundaries and done, in 15 years, what it took the United States 221 years to do."

While she accepts she will never be president of the country because she is white, she has credentials that humble those of many black ANC supporters.

In the 1980s she was a leader of the Black Sash women's resistance movement. She entered mainstream politics in the 1990s when her party was called the Democratic Party and polled 5 per cent in the province. As provincial education minister, she gained the nickname "Godzille" (coming to a school near you) for her dawn blitzes on schools with high teacher absenteeism. Her mantra since becoming Mayor of Cape Town in 2006 has been to show up the "failed state" created by the ANC, whose centralised approach she believes stunts service delivery.

Reformed municipal policing and efforts to combat drug crime appear to be among her achievements. But gangs still rule the Cape Flats and the burden of poverty is still so huge that it is impossible to say that the DA does a better job than the ANC.

Nevertheless, that is what Zille plans to do. She told the crowd that as provincial Premier she would "try to govern as well as I can, to show that life is better for everybody under the DA".

The crowd did not need convincing, waving "Wake up SA and support Helen" banners.

- OBSERVER