ANC's grip on metros slips as municipal vote count continues

South Africa’s electoral commission released partial results late on Thursday showing the African National Congress at roughly 32 percent of the vote in this week’s municipal elections, with more than 60 percent of ballots counted. The figure, if it holds, would mark a further erosion of the governing party’s authority over the country’s key metropolitan institutions, including Johannesburg, the financial capital whose governance has long rested with the ANC.

The Democratic Alliance stood second nationally at 25 percent. The uMkhonto weSizwe party, the breakaway opposition formed by former President Jacob Zuma, was third at 8.5 percent, underperforming the levels suggested by opinion polls.

Accountability for deteriorating municipal services has weighed heavily on the ANC, now led by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The party has borne the brunt of public criticism over years of local mismanagement that have left residents contending with failing water supplies, persistent power cuts and crumbling public services. It has also faced corruption allegations, while splinter parties have chipped away at its support base. The party itself has acknowledged its failures in local governance.

The numbers trace a long institutional decline. The ANC, which has been South Africa’s largest party since leading the country out of apartheid in 1994, has historically fared worse in municipal contests than in national ones. From nearly 70 percent of the national vote in 2004, it fell below 50 percent for the first time in the 2021 municipal elections, winning 46 percent. At the 2024 national elections it managed just over 40 percent and was compelled to accept a unity government with nine other parties, among them the DA.

Turnout offered one counterpoint to the grim arithmetic for the governing party. About 15.9 million of 29.2 million registered voters cast ballots, according to the electoral commission, an estimated 54.5 percent, up from 46 percent in the pandemic-hit 2021 local elections.

What happens next in the country’s major cities may be decided as much in negotiation rooms as at the ballot box. Control of the eight metropolitan municipalities is up for grabs, along with dozens of district and local councils, and with outright majorities far from assured in several of them, the results could trigger another round of complex coalition bargaining as parties assemble the alliances needed to govern.

Meanwhile, projections by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, a state-funded research body, point to shifting control in several centres. The DA was forecast to retain Cape Town with 56 percent of the vote, and its leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, has already declared victory. In Johannesburg, the party was leading with 34 percent after a campaign spearheaded by its former leader, Helen Zille, 75. The MK party, which had been tipped as one of the few capable of an outright majority in the eastern port city of Durban, was projected at 32 percent there by the CSIR.

The outcome of this week’s local ballot will serve as a key measure of voter sentiment ahead of the 2029 general election, and a test of whether the ANC’s hold on the institutions of urban governance can survive in coalition or not. Final results are expected on Sunday, and with them the first clear picture of who will answer for the running of South Africa’s cities.