On Sunday, 8 November, at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand, between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the Electoral Commission announced a number the African National Congress had spent three decades assuming it would never hear. The party of Nelson Mandela had taken 30.76 per cent of the vote in the municipal elections held four days earlier, according to the final results. That came to 3,246 council seats. The ANC is still the largest party in South Africa. It has never been this small.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Federica Marsi described the vote of Wednesday, 4 November, as confirmation that the movement which led the country out of apartheid is caught in a downward spiral, pushed along by years of anger over corruption scandals and services that never arrive. Fikile Mbalula, the ANC’s secretary-general, found one word for it: “catastrophic.”
The arithmetic of a decline
The numbers tell it plainly. In 1994, in the first democratic election, under Mandela, the ANC won 63 per cent. In the 2006 local elections it reached 66 per cent. By the 2021 local vote it was down to 46. In 2024 it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time, taking just over 40 per cent, and had to share national power in a coalition. Now it has 31. That is 15 points gone in five years: roughly one in every three of the local voters it still had in 2021.
“It’s the ANC’s worst result in history,” the analyst Daniel Silke told AFP.
On the proportional ballot, tallies with almost every voting district reported put the Democratic Alliance on 24.7 per cent, Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party on 9.8 and the Economic Freedom Fighters on 6.2. Around 14.9 million of 29.2 million registered voters cast a ballot, a turnout of about 52 per cent. Nearly half the electorate stayed home.
The cities
The vote covered eight major cities, 44 district municipalities and 205 local municipalities. The ANC won outright majorities in 53 municipalities and finished first in 128. The losses that will be remembered came in Gauteng, the province where the money is. The DA overtook the ANC as the largest party in Johannesburg, in Pretoria, the capital, and in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg. In Johannesburg the DA took 34.79 per cent, the ANC 20.25 and ActionSA 16.27. The DA held Cape Town, the country’s second-largest city. In KwaZulu-Natal, uMkhonto weSizwe, Zuma’s breakaway, contested local elections for the first time and came first there with 34.0 per cent on the ward ballot.
The DA, long dismissed by its rivals as a “white party”, rejects that label. On the basis of its own modelling, it says it won more than a million Black voters for the first time.
What the voters were punishing
The grievances were familiar. Water and electricity failed. Roads went unrepaired, streetlights stayed broken and rubbish went uncollected. Crime ran high. Over all of it hung the affair South Africans call Farmgate: in 2020 burglars stole $580,000 that had been hidden in furniture at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ranch, and Ramaphosa is accused of covering up the theft. Analysts read the result as a rebuke aimed at him personally. He leads the ANC and is expected to step aside before the party’s leadership race in 2027.
“He has been a total disaster, and the people this time have made it very clear,” said the analyst Sipho Seepe. He also said: “The ANC government has been stable, but it has been failing the people.”
A reflection, not a finding: liberation movements tend to govern on a debt their people feel they owe them, and they often mistake that debt for something permanent. It does not run out in a single election. It runs out slowly, through every tap that stays dry and every street that stays dark. Sandile Mnguni of the University of KwaZulu-Natal put it in political terms: the ANC “can no longer rely on its historical political dominance or liberation credentials.” Ralph Mathekga, author of The ANC’s Last Decade, said voters now see the party as the “chief culprit.” “The elections were clearly a referendum on the ANC’s capacity to govern and turn the corner,” he said.
Fourteen days
Almost every big city now has a hung council. The parties have 14 days to negotiate before the councils are formed. An ANC-DA arrangement would mirror the two parties’ national partnership, now two years old, but they disagree on how to deal with the inequality apartheid left behind. The DA has signalled it may look elsewhere, to parties committed to “clean and accountable government, rooting out corruption, service delivery for all, the rule of law, and non-racialism.” Its wins in Gauteng are likely to strengthen its hand, both in the council talks and nationally.
Ramaphosa, presiding over the shrinking of his own party, called for humility at the negotiating table: “Our people’s interest must not be drowned by the quest of political parties or representatives to settle political scores.”
Johannesburg has seen this before: fragile coalitions in its metros, mayors who came and went. The warnings are already in. Mnguni foresaw “political stalemating, unstable alliances and disagreements.” Busi Mavuso, chief executive of Business Leadership South Africa, said that “Unstable coalitions with precarious leadership teams cannot deliver”. Others see the fragmentation as a kind of health. Voters “do not want concentration of power in one party,” Mathekga said, and he called the change a “necessary evolution of South African politics.” “From now on, we can accept coalitions to be the new normal,” Seepe said. Mnguni, for all his warnings, still sees the shift as positive, provided parties “place governance above narrow partisan interests.”
The next general election is due in 2029. Mnguni’s warning to the ANC is conditional, and that is what makes it pointed: “If the underlying grievances of the electorate remain unaddressed, the party could face even greater electoral challenges.”