Johannesburg - South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) won the country's election with a decisive majority according to results Saturday - but appeared to have fallen just short of the two-thirds majority it wanted to enable it to change the constitution. With around 99 per cent of votes counted, Jacob Zuma's ANC had 66.2 per cent of votes to the 400-seat National Assembly, against 16 per cent for the Democratic Alliance of Cape Town mayor Helen Zille and 7 per cent for the the fledgling Congress of the People.

The Independent Electoral Commission was due to announce the final results later Saturday and officially declare the ANC the winner.

Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown had already become one of the first world leaders to congratulate Zuma on his win, Downing Street said, in a short telephone call late Friday night.

Whilst the ANC has been celebrating the result as a resounding mandate for controversial leader Jacob Zuma, who had faced a trial for corruption until a few weeks before the election, the ANC in fact dropped support in percentage terms for the first time since it came to power under Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Mandela's successor Thabo Mbeki, whom Zuma ousted as ANC leader in 2007, had increased the party's vote to 70 per cent in 2004.

The ANC pointed to the fact that it had won more votes than ever before because around 2 million more people voted in these elections than the previously.

South Africa has a proportional representation system, which means that seats in parliament are allocated according to each party's share of the vote.

While apparently falling below two-thirds of the popular vote, the ANC might have polled enough to give it a critical two-thirds of seats in parliament. A two-thirds majority, or
267 seats, is needed for a party to push through constitutional amendments on its own.

Based on around 17 million votes cast, around 40,000 seats was necessary to clinch one seat.

The IEC was due to confirm the allocation of seats over the weekend.

The opposition Democratic Alliance has used the election to campaign hard to change its image of being the party of the white minority.(dpa)