CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — For the first time in 30 years, South African lawmakers will elect a president Friday, the outcome of which will not be a mere formality.
Cyril Ramaphosa is seeking a second term as leader of Africa’s most industrialized economy, but his African National Congress party has been weakened after losing its long-standing majority in elections last month, and he will need the support of other parties if he wants to return as president. president.
The ANC hopes that an overall coalition agreement with others – especially the main opposition Democratic Alliance – will hold and that they will support Ramaphosa’s re-election. The ANC needs lawmakers from parties that were once its main political enemies to vote for Ramaphosa now and continue the ANC’s three-decade hold on the presidency.
The ANC announced late on Thursday evening that it had an in-principle coalition agreement with the DA and other smaller parties, but ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula said the final details of the agreement still needed to be worked out. Crucially, he did not say there was agreement among coalition partners that their lawmakers in parliament would vote for Ramaphosa, even though he said the ANC hoped this would happen.
The DA, which is the second-largest party in Parliament after the ANC and which has a potentially decisive number of lawmakers, said discussions over the exact details had continued throughout the night and into Friday morning and that there were just hours before Parliament was due to adopted no agreement had yet been signed. meeting at 10 a.m. local time.
The 71-year-old Ramaphosa is expected to be re-elected as no other candidate has been nominated, but the country was politically tense ahead of the first session of parliament since the historic May 29 elections. He could have a smooth transition to a second term if he is the only candidate nominated, in which case he would be automatically elected. But if other candidates are nominated by other parties, a vote will follow.
The ANC also faced a deadline to put together some form of coalition agreement as Parliament must sit for the first time and vote for the president within a fortnight of the election results being announced. The deadline is Sunday and Parliament met on Friday to meet that deadline.
South Africa has not faced this level of political uncertainty since the ANC came to power in the first all-race elections in 1994, ending almost half a century of white minority rule under the apartheid system of racial segregation.
The ANC had since had a clear majority in parliament, which meant that elections for the presidency were a formality and every South African leader since then had been a member of the ANC, starting with Nelson Mandela. Last month’s elections changed that, when the ANC’s share of the vote fell to 40%. The DA won the second largest share of the vote with 21%, making it an important party in the coalition talks.
The ANC had proposed forming a national unity government in the aftermath of the elections and invited all the other seventeen parties that had won seats in parliament to join it. Some have refused.
On Friday, Parliament will first elect a speaker and deputy speaker before voting on the president, and the meeting could last hours. The lower house of parliament, called the National Assembly, will vote in favor of all these positions. It consists of 400 legislatures and requires a majority of votes cast to elect a president. They vote by secret ballot.
At least one party, the MK party of former ANC leader and South African President Jacob Zuma, has said it will boycott the first meeting and that its 58 lawmakers will not take their seats. This is not expected to affect the voting process as South Africa’s constitution stipulates that at least one-third of the 400 legislators must be present for a quorum and to vote. The ANC alone has over a third of the seats.
Parliament will also meet in unusual surroundings after a fire destroyed the National Assembly building in Cape Town in 2022. It has not yet been restored, which is why lawmakers will decide on their country’s next leader at a conference center on the city’s waterfront.
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AP Africa News: https://apnews.com/hub/africa
