South Africa’s main opposition Democratic Alliance party has retained power to govern the Western Cape Province despite the ruling African National Congress’ efforts to wrestle power from it, latest electoral results showed on Saturday.
The DA’s victory, however, was with a reduced majority of 55.58% of the votes. The party had received 59.38% of the votes in 2014.
“My warm congratulations to the DA. Alan Winde (DA’s regional party leader), you may become the next premier if your colleagues in the legislature decide to vote for you,” said Courtney Sampson, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) head in the Western Cape Province.
According to the IEC, the region’s voter turnout was around 66%, which is about 6% down on the previous provincial election in 2014.
“That’s a comparison we must make, some 6% down from the last elections with a bigger voters’ roll. It’s quite possible that 66% can represent more people,” Sampson said.
The ANC support in the province also declined as the party could only muster 28.5% of the votes, down from the 32.9% it got five years ago, the agency said.
ANC provincial secretary Faiez Jacobs thanked those who voted for the party. He decried a poor voter turnout in its traditional support base as contributing to the poor result.
He said the party would do a proper assessment of the result to find out what led to the low voter turnout in areas where it had previously been high.
The ruling party is, however, expected to win the other eight provinces of the country, thereby retaining them as it did in the last polls of 2014.
NM/jn/APA