- Direction of the country: o Before the election, 14% of South Africans said that the country is going in the right direction. This increased to 39% after the election. o A comparison of individual respondents’ attitudes across the two survey waves indicates that 35% of the population became more positive in their outlook, while 10% became more negative.
- Government performance: o Most citizens were dissatisfied with government delivery of a variety of services in the runup to the election. o After the election, at least four in 10 South Africans anticipated that the new coalition government would be more effective in fighting corruption (41%), creating jobs (42%), and providing a reliable electricity supply (67%).
- Views on democracy: o The proportion of South Africans who said that democracy is preferable to any other form of government increased from 45% (pre-election) to 55% (post election). o The share of citizens who expressed satisfaction with the way democracy works in South Africa increased from 36% to 59%. o Four in 10 respondents (39%) shifted from expressing dissatisfaction or a neutral opinion before the election to saying they were “fairly” or “very” satisfied with their country’s democracy. o Individual-level increases in satisfaction were particularly strong among non-ANC supporters.
South Africa’s national and provincial elections on 29 May 2024 marked a turning point in the country’s democracy. For the first time since the end of apartheid, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority and had to form a coalition with 10 other political parties to govern the country (South African History Online, 2024). This coalition is popularly called the GNU (Government of National Unity), in reference to the country’s transitional government resulting from the first post-apartheid elections in 1994.
Beyond ending the former liberation movement’s electoral dominance, the 2024 elections were also an inflection point for the country’s broader democratic project. Voters expressed their opinion not only on the ANC’s economic and political performance, but also on how well South Africa’s democracy has worked to deliver the promises of the post-apartheid dispensation.
In recent years, the ANC has failed to deliver on key election promises and struggled to hold its own leadership accountable for several high-level corruption cases (Bezuidenhout, 2024). During President Cyril Ramaphosa’s first term (2019-2024), South Africans experienced prolonged periods of severe electricity shortages, lacklustre economic growth, and stubbornly high unemployment (World Bank, 2024). Although many of these issues are long term problems that have plagued the country for more than a decade, they have been greatly exacerbated by recent external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and economic fallout of the Ukraine war (Kolongo, 2024).
Previous Afrobarometer findings have shown that South Africans have been increasingly dissatisfied with the country’s overall direction and the way democracy has worked in their country (Dryding, 2020; Mpani & Ndoma, 2024). Furthermore, voter turnout has declined steadily over time (Mbete, 2024).
This report presents findings on changes in citizens’ attitudes toward and evaluations of democracy between the time of the 2024 election campaign and the period shortly after the election. Data from Afrobarometer’s first telephonic panel survey suggest that the election led to an increase in optimism about the country’s overall trajectory and democracy among many South Africans – at least in the period immediately following the vote. Moreover, despite citizens’ bleak evaluations of government service delivery prior to the election, after the vote many were optimistic that the new coalition government would perform better on key issues such as electricity provision, job creation, and the fight against corruption.
Related content
