Word: anc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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South Africa goes to the polls Wednesday in an election billed as the most important since Nelson Mandela led his nation to overthrow apartheid 15 years ago. How so, when the result - a landslide for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the election of its leader Jacob Zuma to the presidency - is barely in doubt? Here's TIME's quick question-and-answer guide to South Africa's general election: (Read "Why South Africa's Over The Rainbow...
...Will the ANC win easily? Yes, or at least by a comfortable margin. Most opinion polls put its support between 60% and 70% of the popular vote. (It won 66% in 2004.) The lowest prediction gives the party 47% support. But even that figure would still make it by far South Africa's largest party. Its nearest rivals - the Democratic Alliance and the Congress of the People, which split from the ANC late last year - rarely score more than 15% each in any survey...
Does that mean Jacob Zuma will be President? Almost certainly. He is the President of the ANC, and the national President is elected by Parliament, whose members, under a proportional-representation system, are allocated seats according to their party's share of Wednesday's vote...
...result is almost assured, why so much interest? Three reasons. First, South Africa is Africa's economic and political heavyweight. What happens in South Africa affects all Africa and is often seen as a weather vane for the continent. In particular, the ANC is the most prominent of Africa's liberation movements - the revolutionary parties that overthrew white or colonial rule. Its success or failure in adapting from the demands of fighting a revolutionary war to the demands of competing in a free and fair democracy - requiring less a transition than a total reinvention - has wide implications for Africa, even...
South Africa can take comfort from the knowledge that even its greatest leader had trouble making the transition from revolutionary to democrat. In office, Mandela expressed admiration for autocrats like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and in his farewell speech to the ANC party conference in 1997 claimed South Africa's violent crime was part of a "counter-revolution" engineered by pro-apartheid whites "to render the country ungovernable." But in retirement, Mandela rediscovered his inner democrat, speaking out against tyranny, wherever he found it - even in his own party. In March 2007, at the funeral of Adelaide Tambo, wife...