President F.W. de Klerk conceded defeat Monday in South Africa's election to Nelson Mandela, clearing the way for Mandela to become the country's first black president.
With 40 percent of the votes counted, de Klerk's National Party had just 24.5 percent support to 61.4 percent for Mandela's African National Congress."Mr. Mandela will soon assume the highest office in the land, with all the awesome responsibility which it bears," de Klerk said at a news conference at National Party headquarters in Pretoria.
Referring to his negotiations with Mandela on ending apartheid over the past four years, de Klerk said: "I thank him and congratulate him. He deserves the congratulations, good wishes and prayers of all South Africans.
"I look forward to working with him constructively in the government of national unity in our common effort to promote the well-being of all our people," he said.
Mandela was expected to make a victory statement later Monday night, formalizing what had been anticipated for months, since the ANC and government set the dates for the country's first multiracial election.
The ANC was certain to win a majority in the new 400-seat Parliament, based on Mandela's overwhelming popularity among the black majority. It was less clear whether the ANC would win a two-thirds majority that would allow it to write a permanent, post-apartheid constitution single-handedly.
The new Parliament is to elect a president Friday, setting the stage for Mandela to replace de Klerk as head of state. De Klerk is expected to be vice president.
In a bid for national reconciliation, the ANC suggested Sunday night that white conservatives and Zulu nationalists could join in the new government, despite their relatively poor showing in the vote.
The Independent Electoral Commission, which organized the vote and counting, said final results might not be available until Tuesday.
In some places, counting that was supposed to have started at 6 a.m. Saturday still had not begun Monday morning. And many of the teachers and bank tellers hired to hand-count ballots had to return to work Monday, leaving counting posts unstaffed. At other stations, disputes arose over the use of party supporters to count ballots.
In another example of the disarray, the commission had to drastically scale back the vote total for the white, liberal Democratic Party after a computing error sent the group surging to fourth place. After the correction was made Monday, the party sank back to also-ran status.
The slow-moving process raised allegations of irregularities from many political leaders. An election commission spokesman, Humphrey Khoza, said 500 complaints had been lodged.
However, there were no indications any party would reject the results, which were about what polls had predicted.
According to a formula aimed at creating a broad-based government, any party receiving at least 5 percent of the vote gets a Cabinet seat in the new government. But with the Freedom Front, Inkatha and other parties faring so poorly, ANC officials hinted at relaxing that rule to ensure wider participation by opposition parties.
ANC spokesman Pallo Jordan said the group wanted "to make government as inclusive as possible."
"We would not exclude the idea of the IFP being part of a government of national unity" even if it finished with less than 5 percent of the vote, Jordan said Sunday night.
The same could apply to the Freedom Front and smaller parties such as the Democratic Party and the black militant Pan Africanist Congress.
Provincial results clearly illustrated the country's ethnic divisions.
In the Western Cape region, which has large mixed-race communities, the National Party led after a campaign that played on mixed-race fears of life under black domination.
But in the other predominantly mixed-race province, the Northern Cape, the ANC moved ahead Monday.
In the Zulu stronghold of KwaZulu-Natal, Inkatha held a strong lead, but the ANC predicted ultimate victory there.
"We are not worried as yet," said ANC spokesman Themba Rubushe in Durban, the main city of KwaZulu-Natal. "But we didn't expect the fight for Natal to be like this. It's the delays that are really working on our nerves."
The ANC had big leads - in come cases capturing more than 80 percent of the vote - in the country's seven other provinces.