FREE DAILY EMAIL

The African National Congress will win a two-thirds majority in next year's general elections, in the process increasing its seats in Parliament from the current 266 members to 271 in 2004.

This was the prediction from the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) yesterday, where its South African Social Attitudes Survey was unveiled at a media briefing.

"The HSRC projection is that the ANC will win 67,8% of the votes next year," said Dr Udesh Pillay, executive director of surveys, analyses, modelling and mapping in the HSRC.

The Democratic Alliance would remain the official opposition with 10,5% of the vote, followed by the New National Party with 8,7%, the Inkatha Freedom Party with 7,1% and the United Democratic Movement with 1,7%.

Projections for the smaller parties were Pan Africanist Congress (0,51 and the Azanian People's Organisation were predicted to poll 0,51% and 0,44% of the votes.

The African Christian Democratic Party and the new Independent Democrats were expected to garner 0,45% and 0,44% respectively, with the Freedom Front coming in at 0,46%.

Pillay said that the survey comprised of a "major" sample of 7 501 respondents of voting age drawn from a random selection across the country, with fieldworkers able to go back to households to monitor trends and evaluate interventions.

Asked the question: "For which party do you plan to vote in the next election", 32,6% of the responses were "unknown" with another 7,8% declaring they "won't vote".

Of the 7,8% of respondents who said they would not vote, the largest proportion of just over 40% said they would not participate because they were not interested.

The results also showed that the ANC would retain control of the Western Cape with the help of the NNP. In KwaZulu-Natal the IFP, in alliance with the DA, was expected to win.

In all seven other provinces the ANC was expected to win.

Asked what was one of the more salient surprises of the survey, HSRC chief executive Dr Mark Orkin highlighted the breakdown of race among voters voting for particular parties.

There was still a strong degree of racially based party political focus, he said.

This was borne of by figures in the survey, which indicated that black voters dominated support of the ANC at 93,4%, while white support was minimal at 0,4%.

The IFP was also predominantly black with 97,8% of its support base black.

By contrast, more than 75% of the supporters of the DA were white.

Orkin said the "most mixed" party was the NNP.

"The rainbow nation... is not yet translating in the majority of parties into racially intergrated voters," he said.

Orkin said the new type of survey, which used discriminative analysis, was one of the largest samples taken in the country, and was three times as large as other typical samples for commercial opinion surveys.

He said the survey "raised the bar" for other surveys and challenged the polling industry not to "befuddle" politicians, voters and opinion-makers.

Other interesting predictions in the survey showed that the DA would increase its parliamentary seats from 38 to 42 and the NNP from 28 to 35.

The big losers were predicted to be the IFP, going down from 34 to 28, the UDM from 14 to 7, the ACDP from 6 to 2 and the PAC from 3 to 2 seats.

The Independent Democrats were expected to win two seats. – Sapa.

SPONSORED BY

Advanced