The
South African general election of 2013 has seemingly marked the twilight of the era of political calm that the country had gone through since the end of its civil war a quarter-century before. Following the end of the South African Civil War, apartheid had been abolished and the country's black majority finally allowed to vote and participate in their nation's political future. The African National Congress (ANC), riding off both the legacy of the war and their long efforts to end apartheid, emerged as the dominant party, getting a super-majority of the vote in the first three elections and having little reason to fear a divided opposition. Outside of die-hard supporters of the "martyred" Magnus Malan, most white South Africans accepted the new order, although they emerged as the strongest political opponents of the ANC. A series of mergers of the surviving apartheid-era parties resulted in the creation of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) as the primary opposition to the ANC from the center. The presence of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a conservative Zulu-interest party, prevented the 1990s political landscape from being a majority-black party (ANC) against a majority-white party (NDA).
But by the time President Kgalema Mothlanthe's first term begun to wind down in 2008, the ANC's status as an unassailable juggernaut had begun to fall. Internal party divisions came to ahead as the ANC leadership sidelined several hard-left MPs who, in response, left the party to form the SA Freedom Forces (SAFF) to challenge the ANC from the left, and in explicitly more black nationalist terms. Corruption scandals emerged with such regularity that more ANC members left the party in disgust to form the Peoples’ Congress Party (PCP), a party with little more to its platform than a strong anti-corruption stance. The resulting election was a shocker, not in the result (another ANC majority) but in the fact that the ANC only barely won a majority of the popular vote.
Mothlanthe's second term did little to stop the dissatisfaction felt with the ANC by many in the big-tent party. Despite the country’s handling of the 2012 Summer Olympics in Johannesburg going relatively smoothly, Mothlanthe's hand-off leadership led to infighting between ANC factions, which prevented a coherent ideology from emerging from the administration just as South African voters were looking for one. The lack of improvement in the wages and working conditions of many industrial workers since Nelson Mandela's term led to a series of strikes that alienated the ANC from its organized labor supporters. Mothlanthe's precarious position within the party resulted in his inability to placate the strikers and, after enough cabinet ministers’ patience had worn out in dealing with the union leadership (who had grown frustrated at Mothlanthe's wavering and the influence anti-strike ministers had over him), the strikes were crushed in a wave of arrests of union leadership on trumped-up charges. The strike was dispersed violently at the Lommin mine, resulting in the largest instance of violence the country had experienced since the war.
Many labor leaders, horrified and enraged, bolted from the party they had supported for decades and formed Forward South Africa (Forward SA) under former union leader Zwelinzima Vavi. NDA leader Wilmot James, sensing an opportunity, quickly obtained the promise of a coalition government in case the ANC lost its majority in the upcoming elections. Cyril Ramaphosa, the new ANC leader and candidate for president in 2013, spent most of the last few months before the elections furiously reminding voters of the ANC's history as the leader in the fight against apartheid and their role in the (slow) progress that had been made to reverse its economic and social effects.
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For the first time since 1961, one party did not win a majority of votes. Forward SA pulled votes from most of the other parties represented in the previous parliament, but especially the SAFF and PCP, the latter of whom was left with only one seat as a result of losing over half of its support from 2008. Despite this, the ANC retained a (slightly diminished) majority, owing in part to the double-list system used to allocate seats to the National Assembly. Ramaphosa's skill as a negotiator has so far served him well in placating the increasingly uneasy factions in the ANC as well as opposition parties, but polling indicates that support for the ANC is waning as more and more of the generation born after the war and end of apartheid become eligible to vote, leading to an uncertain future when the life of the current parliament ends in 2018, three decades after the end of apartheid.