By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema said his party would prefer to be in a coalition with the African National Congress (ANC) after both parties performed poorly in the election.
Malema was addressing members of the media at the National Results Operation Centre (ROC) in Midrand on Saturday.
The final results have not yet been formally declared by the independent electoral commission.
It means a flurry of negotiations are set to take place which are likely to be complicated.
The main opposition party, Democratic Alliance (DA), was on 21%, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), got 14%, while the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by Malema, received 9%.
In total, more than 50 parties took part in the election, many of them with tiny shares of the vote.
The ANC, which freed the country from apartheid in the early 1990s, has won every previous national election by a landslide since the historic 1994 vote that ended white minority rule.
But over the last decade, ANC support has dwindled amid widespread poverty, a stagnating economy, rising unemployment, and power and water shortages.
Malema admitted that the party’s electoral support has been severely affected by the rise of uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party.
He has welcomed the outcomes of the 2024 national and provincial elections.
Malema said the MK Party has changed the country’s political space, insisting most organisations underestimated the support of Jacob Zuma.
He said the key takeaway for this election is that the ANC has lost its majority in Parliament and in several provinces, such as Gauteng, Northern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.
“Now that the parliamentary majority of the ANC has been broken and there is no single political party that can constitute government on its own, we as the EFF will be engaging with different political parties on how we elect leadership for Parliament and constitute a government that will lead South Africa for the next five years.”
He said the party wouldn’t mind getting into a coalition with the ANC.
“We are going to negotiate with the ANC” for a possible coalition deal, he said, although that would not be quite enough to clinch a majority without including another party on the current count.
Malema said a coalition arrangement would see the ANC being called to account for corruption.
“We are not going to allow ANC corruption. One of the positions we are going to demand from the ANC is the speaker of Parliament. You can’t go into a coalition with the ANC and not have a speaker. The ANC is running the executive, we have to run the speaker so that we monitor them and make them accountable.”
The new parliament must be sworn in within two weeks of the final results and the new president would normally be chosen then.
Both the EFF and MK advocate seizing white-owned land and nationalising the country’s mines – policies which would alarm foreign investors.