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Pretoria – The mighty ANC was on Saturday given a psychological blow when the final election results confirmed that it had lost its two-thirds majority.

Jacob Zuma’s party received 65.9% of the vote -the ANC’s weakest performance since the first democratic elections in 1994. That’s almost 4% less than in 2004.

The ANC’s Jeff Radebe said “We are very satisfied. It is a strong victory, we even got more than a million more votes than in 1994.”

He went on to say they are in ‘no way’ dissapointed. Seeing as this is the largest turn out since 1994 with many more voters casting their ballots than in the preceeding two elections, coupled with the fact than an increased population brings about an increased voter pool, a mere million more votes than 1994 doesn’t bode too well for the ruling party.

Analysts however, took a different view to the result than the ANC has taken publically. While this election victory may seem overwhelming, there are a few things that the opposition can be happy about.

As Professor Steven Friedman, a political analyst, says:

“This (the loss of the two-thirds majority) is a psychological victory for opposition parties and purely of symbolic value. The ANC will not admit it in public, but it shows they will have to work harder to retain voters.”

The ANC spent at least R200m on its campaign and more than 11 million people voted for them.

The DA got almost 17% support and Cope just over 7%.

The support the DA got this time around cannot be sneezed at, at close to 20% of the national vote, the opposition is growing and now it seems almost one in five of our demographic is voting for the official opposition.

Professor Sipho Seepe, another political commentator, said a DA government in the Western Cape was a threat to the ANC.

“The ANC will have to do better, because if the DA does well, voters will say ‘maybe we should give them (the DA) more provinces’.”

EArlier this afternoon, the count reached the 16 million mark, totalling 16,025,818 shortly before 5pm. The number was registered voters is 23,282,997.

This indicated that the IEC was 70 percent of the way through processing the results.

The ANC remained in pole position with 10,479,367 votes (66.29) followed by the Democratic Alliance with 1,184,456 votes (16.21 percent).

Cope failed to make good on its assertion that it had severely dented the ANC’s grip on the Eastern Cape, by trailing far behind the ruling party’s 1,609,926 (69.70 percent) votes with its 307,437 votes (13.31 percent).

It had, however, dislodged the DA’s position as chief opposition in that province, with the DA receiving 230,187 votes (9.97 percent).

The battle for the Western Cape is all but won by Helen Zille’s DA, which received 788,008 votes (50.38 percent).

The ANC is in the second position with 481,998 votes (30.81 percent), followed by Cope’s 138,819 votes.

Nationally, the Inkatha Freedom Party was in fourth position with 703,885 votes (4.45 percent), followed by the ID with 146,919 votes (0.093 percent).