ANC down and Jacob Zuma up after South Africa elections

South Africa’s respected Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the News24 website have projected that the ANC’s final vote could be around 42%.

If this turn out to be the case, the result would be catastrophic for the ANC – and Mr Ramaphosa.

He could come under pressure from the party to resign, with his deputy, Paul Mashatile, being touted as a potential successor.

Mr Ramaphosa led the ANC into a lacklustre election campaign, and the party became so desperate that it got former President Thabo Mbeki – as well as other retired party leaders – to join the campaign in a bid to bolster its vote.

The president is widely seen as weak and indecisive. He has defended himself by saying his focus was on “social compacting”, or building consensus.

“Those who would like a president who is dictatorial, who is adventurous, who is reckless, will not find that in me,” he said, while on the campaign trail, external.

Mr Ramaphosa’s chances of remaining in office will be stronger if the ANC gets between 45% and 50% of the final vote.

This is the result that many ANC members had resigned themselves to during the election campaign, and said the party could remain in power in coalition with smaller parties – like the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which draws its support mainly from ethnic Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal, or the Muslim Al Jama-ah party.

But if the ANC falls below 45%, it is likely to need a big party as a coalition partner.

This could be the EFF or the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), which advocates centre-right policies such as greater privatisation and the scrapping of the minimum wage, and the IFP.

The DA’s support appears to have grown in this election, with the party having regained the votes of white people who backed a party to its right in the last election, and some black people who felt it needed to be given a chance in national government.

Any coalition deal at national level would be influenced by what happens in the provinces – especially the most populous ones of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, home to Johannesburg and Pretoria.

The ANC could offer the DA and IFP a deal that would see the three parties governing jointly at national level, and in KwaZulu-Natal.

“The DA and IFP have kept that option open in order to keep the EFF and MK out of government,” Mr Harper said.

The ANC’s other option is try form a coalition with the EFF in the national government, as well as in Gauteng, where the ANC is also set to lose its outright majority.

ANC leaders in Gauteng, backed by Mr Mashatile, are said to prefer a coalition with the EFF.

Mr Malema, a former ANC youth leader, is apparently open to the idea.

In South Africa’s Daily Maverick news site earlier this month, journalist Ferial Haffajee wrote that the EFF leader – who was previously convicted of hate speech for singing the anti-apartheid song Shoot the Boer [a reference to white farmers] – was “more considered and less fury-filled” during the election campaign, and at a town hall meeting in April, he expressed the view that the EFF’s natural coalition partner is the ANC, external.

“Even if the business community and markets are spooked by an ANC-EFF coalition, its potential is clearly front and centre in Malema’s strategy to get to the Union Buildings [the seat of government],” Ms Haffajee wrote.

“Part of the ANC supports a coalition with the EFF. At the same time, Ramaphosa’s supporters in the ANC believe that such a coalition will cause an existential crisis for the culture of the old liberation movement,” she added.

So, tough decisions lie ahead for the ANC following an election that sees South Africa enter a new era, with the opposition having the power to make or break the government.