Former Treasury budget office chief Michael Sachs highlighted that the decline in national electoral turnout in favour of the African National Congress (ANC) has been accelerating since 2004.

Polls have predicted that the ANC will fall below 50% in electoral support in the upcoming May 29 general election.

Ahead of the elections, Sachs’ analysis of the voting trends and party support over 20 years, reflects on data from the Independent Electoral Commission and Statistics South Africa, over four general elections. He noted that he did not include the 1994 election because it was “in so many ways a special and unique election”.

He explained that elections were a contest for power, in general, and control over legislative and executive authority, in particular, adding that the only criterion for success was the percentage a party wins.

He said percentages were important in this respect, but the absolute number of votes cast in favour of various parties was also an important indicator of long-term trends in political support and participation.

He explained that votes for the ANC surged in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in the 2009 election thanks to former President Jacob Zuma’s candidacy.

“This factor may also have led to an increase in ANC votes in Gauteng and Mpumalanga, which are home to large numbers of people with roots in KZN. This Gauteng surge may partly reflect the emergence of the Congress of the People (Cope),” he noted

Sachs said that in addition to the surge in KZN for the ANC, the entry of Cope into the 2009 election, following its formation when Thabo Mbeki stood down as President, boosted the total vote for this bloc.

He said if KZN was excluded from the numbers, the surge was still witnessed in support for the ANC in 2009.

“The combined vote of the ANC and Cope in 2009 was 10.7-million outside KZN, higher than the vote the ANC had received in the 2004 election. In other words, the creation of Cope (which garnered 1.3-million votes in 2009) probably had the effect of mobilising new voters into the 2009 election,” he said.

He highlighted that the combination of significant threats to the ANC’s KZN base and declining effective turnout in the rest of the country could be fatal for the ANC’s majority.

If the ANC’s support in KZN fell back to pre-Zuma levels, it would have 750 000 fewer votes in that province, a major blow to the ANC nationally, Sachs stated.

He noted that the ANC’s support as a share of registered votes or as a share of the eligible population had fallen even faster.

He added that the result was that active support for the ANC – in the form of voting – had been falling faster than the electoral outcomes suggest. He said less than one-third of the eligible electorate voted ANC in 2019.

Meanwhile, he said opposition votes have increased substantially in absolute terms between 2004 and 2014, however the increase slowed into 2019.

“While the opposition has gained in percentage terms, this does not reflect an increase in support amongst the whole electorate. In the last two elections, the opposition vote barely kept pace with the increase in registered voters, and opposition support fell as a share of the voting population in the 2019 election,” Sachs said.