ANC rejects reform and doubles down on failed ideology, hastening its collapse.
Key topics:
ANC vote share collapses from 70% in 2004 to 30% in 2025
Party rejects reform, doubles down on NDR and race-based policies
Once rewarded for pragmatism, ANC now writes its own obituary
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Political parties that dominate a society for decades tend to assume their grip will last indefinitely. Yet history shows how quickly power can crumble.
In the 1988 Canadian parliamentary elections, the Progressive Conservatives won a substantive 43% of the vote, enough to govern with in the Canadian system. One election cycle later, in 1993, the party crashed to a mere 16%. It never recovered, folding into a new merger party in 2003.
The ANC now stands before a similar abyss. After thirty years in power, its vote share collapsed from the peak of 70% in 2004 to just 40% in 2024. 2025 IRR and other polling, and analysis of by-election results by Dawie Boonzaaier, point to an ANC with 30% national support. In a recent conversation with Mike Sham on the State of the Nation podcast, Frans Cronje pointed out how an ANC which imploded in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal may have no feasible path to party coherence, never mind recovery.
Facing extinction, the usual expectation in nature and politics is some fightback spirit kicking in – a will to survive. What has been remarkable about the ANC’s first post-majority year since 1994 is the extent to which the party has shown no survival instinct. Not even the cynical self-preservation of the career politician seems detectable.
Faced with the risk of its total demise, the ANC’s rational post-2024 strategy could have been to take stock and look back for inspiration to when it dominated the political landscape: the 2004 national election.
Housing, electricity, access to water, job creation, fiscal prudence, economic growth. On the back of strong trends on these issues, the ANC defied the unspoken rule of democratic politics across the globe: that a decade of incumbency rarely affords the party in power a chance to grow support.
Rewarding the party
And yet, this is precisely what the ANC did in 2004 – the voter rewarding the party with 69.7% of the vote.
Fiscal discipline, inflation targeting, and an openness to global trade helped stabilise the country economically, allowing unemployment to decline and social policy to improve. The material circumstances of ordinary South Africans improved sufficiently for them to vote ANC en masse.
While patronage networks were already spreading, they had not yet hollowed out the state to the point of collapse. Growth was healthy, confidence was tangible, and optimism about the country’s prospects was common.
Yet, what followed the 2004 triumph was a steady abandonment of its previous position, in favour of an increasingly unpopular and in many ways alien ideological dogma. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR), reduced in overt potency before the 2004 vote, roared back. Black Economic Empowerment was expanded from narrow deals into a system that distorted investment, procurement, taxation, and hiring at almost every level.
Employment equity policies gained speed, resuscitating the racial categories of the repealed Population Registration Act of 1950. Cadre deployment became entrenched, turning state institutions into vehicles for loyalty and patronage. Instead of reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the ANC bled them dry, subjecting them to race-rigged transformational targets instead of operational delivery targets.
Effects were undeniable
By the time South Africans went to the polls in 2024, the effects were undeniable. Load-shedding, ever-increasing as voting day neared, was crippling industry and daily life. Youth unemployment locked millions out of opportunity. Middle-class taxpayers were voting with their feet or their wallets, taking their earnings abroad. Investors spoke with platitudinous reverence in public, but were downscaling or withdrawing in practice.
In the mind of South Africans, the ANC, the formidable organisation that had spent almost a century carving itself into a political behemoth, had become little more than a machine for redistribution without production and promises without delivery. And voters punished it accordingly.
This moment of reckoning could have served as a turning point. The fall from 70% in 2004 to 40% in 2024 ought to have spurred reflection. The example of what had happened to once-dominant parties like Canada’s Progressive Conservatives − how quickly support can collapse once voters turn away − should have been a chilling warning.
Yet the ANC has shown, at most, rhetorical homage to the 2004 political case for voting ANC. Even in the final weeks of the election campaign, according to the groundbreaking SRF tracking poll, the ANC gamble on President Ramaphosa signing the NHI into law cost the party 6 percentage points when the votes were counted.
Since then, the party has chosen to treat its loss of majority not as a signal to change course, but as a reason to accelerate down the same NDR road that had alienated close to 43% of its 2004 support base. Instead of recognising that its brief era of pragmatic policy once earned overwhelming support, it has decided to entrench its ideological agenda more deeply.
