South Africa's 2014 election has gone the way a great many of us thought it would. The ANC, still familiarly called 'the ruling party' - an instructive term in what is in the same breath always called a democracy - is down around 4% and the Democratic Alliance up by not much more.

There is, of course, no simple correlation between these two figures. They also sound marginal for both parties and perhaps the shift will turn out to be temporary: no one can be sure.

Nevertheless the figures coming as part of a ten-year trend undeniably suggest a healthy because orderly decline in ANC dominance and a gradual consolidation of opposition in one major party: the DA as South Africa's 'official opposition', a status their leaders patiently laboured to achieve and that former president Thabo Mbeki, to name but one ANC stalwart, was always reluctant to acknowledge publicly, despite formal provision for it in the constitution.

That was hardly surprising in the case of the struggle generation. But it is increasingly implausible a free generation of women and men will fail to learn that the once derided 'Westminster system' - a strong executive balanced by a strong opposition party - is the desirable condition in a liberal democracy. Nothing else allows them, as voters, to impose on government the need to perform and to act as agents of change if government does not come up to requirements.

Apparently bearing this out, voters shunned the many new single-issue parties in the election and left them without a national seat. An old party of the liberation movement, the PAC, was spurned along with them. On the other hand, Julius Malema's 'revolutionary' new party of Economic Freedom Fighters, the EFF, won a million votes and a 6%+ national share. It sounds like a good start and again perhaps it will turn out to be. It will certainly be represented as such by the EFF.

But the EFF is a loose collection of left, far left and otherwise disaffected opinion that has no permanent claim on the majority in SA society, especially in today's competitive global world. The usual quarrels of the ideological are bound to surface now the team effort of the elections is over.

With the election will go the free and generally encouraging media coverage that buoyed the new party to an exceptional extent during its first eight months. In prospect are the routine and rules of the National Assembly club they have joined and the pressures to conform or be regularly sidelined by its processes and members. Can the red berets SA has come to know survive five years of this?

That and a good deal more remains to be seen. For now, we know the ANC is back in power as expected, if not in quite the same control: most clearly illustrated by the Gauteng result with its big fall in ANC share of votes and, some will want to add, the KZN result that has remarkably promoted the DA to official opposition in the province.

And the most significant result may be yet to come. The qualified victory of President Zuma in this election could well provide the final grounds the party need to justify his early retirement. The ANC will certainly continue to take things forward again from here. But on any independent view, things for the ruling party and its leader are uncertain as never before.

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