ANC Crashes to 32% in South Africa’s Local Elections as Voters Punish the Liberation Party and Coalition Talks Begin

South Africa’s African National Congress is heading for the worst election result in its history, with near-final counts from this week’s local government elections putting the party that led the country out of apartheid on barely a third of the vote. With about 90 per cent of ballots declared on Friday, the ANC stood at roughly 31 per cent nationally, according to Reuters, a collapse of almost 15 percentage points from its showing in the last municipal elections five years ago and far below even the 40 per cent it managed in the 2024 national election.

The scale of the defeat, if confirmed when the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) declares the final results on Sunday, would mark the end of the ANC’s three-decade dominance of South African politics in its most complete form yet. The party has governed the country without interruption since Nelson Mandela led it to victory in the first democratic elections of 1994. It has never before fallen anywhere near a third of the vote at any level of government.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), the liberal pro-business party that is the ANC’s partner in the national coalition government, finished a clear second on more than 24 per cent of the vote, while former president Jacob Zuma’s breakaway uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party took third place with more than 9 per cent in its first-ever local election. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the radical left party led by Julius Malema, fell sharply to about 6 per cent, down from 10.3 per cent in 2021.

The numbers were remarkably consistent as the count progressed, leaving little doubt about the shape of the outcome even before the final declaration. With 70 per cent of ballots counted on Friday morning, official tallies published on the Electoral Commission’s website showed the ANC on 31.9 per cent, the DA on 24.6 per cent and the EFF on 6.2 per cent, according to Bloomberg. By mid-afternoon, with 87 per cent of the country’s 23,696 voting districts counted, the ANC still stood at 31.9 per cent, the DA at 24.2 per cent, MK at 9.4 per cent and the EFF at 6.3 per cent. Projections by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the state-funded research body, had put the ANC’s final share at about 32 per cent and the DA’s at about 26 per cent — almost exactly where the count landed.

Turnout told its own story. About 15.9 million of the 29.2 million registered voters cast ballots, the electoral commission said, putting turnout at an estimated 54.5 per cent, up from 46 per cent in the pandemic-hit 2021 local elections. It was the first time in years that a rise in turnout had worked against the ANC rather than for it. As Louw Nel, an economist at Oxford Economics, told Reuters, ANC voters “did not stay away – as many expected – but rather showed up and voted for alternative parties”.

South Africans voted on Wednesday 4 November in the country’s seventh local government election, choosing councils for 257 municipalities, including eight metropolitan municipalities, 44 district councils and 205 local councils. A record 546 parties contested the polls, fielding nearly 137,000 candidates. Control of the country’s biggest cities was up for grabs, and it is in those cities that the ANC’s defeat was most stark.

The metros fall away

The DA led in six of the eight metropolitan municipalities, according to the IEC figures reported by Reuters and Al Jazeera, and was on course to lose its position as the largest party in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, the country’s two most populous provinces. The ANC was ahead in only one metro, Buffalo City, which includes East London. No party looked likely to win an outright majority in seven of the eight metros, meaning almost every major city in the country will now be governed by a coalition.

Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital and biggest city, delivered the most dramatic single result. The DA was ahead there with about 40 per cent of the vote, with the ANC reduced to about 17.5 per cent and Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA on 15.5 per cent, according to figures reported by Al Jazeera. The CSIR’s projection put the DA on 34 per cent in the city, the ANC on 20 per cent and ActionSA on 16.8 per cent. Either way, the party that once ran Johannesburg unchallenged had been pushed into a distant second place in the city that generates a large share of South Africa’s economic output.

The DA’s campaign in Johannesburg was led by Helen Zille, 75, the party’s former leader and a former premier of the Western Cape, who had told the Associated Press before the vote that the ANC was “in free fall”. The scale of the swing was illustrated in Hyde Park’s Ward 90, the Johannesburg ward that is home to both President Cyril Ramaphosa and EFF leader Julius Malema, where the DA was forecast to win 79.4 per cent of the vote, with the ANC on 4.6 per cent and the EFF on 2.3 per cent, according to the Daily Maverick.

In Cape Town, the DA was forecast to retain control with about 56 per cent of the vote, with its leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, already declaring victory. Official data showed the DA on about 60 per cent of the votes counted so far in the city, according to Reuters. Cape Town is the one major city the DA has governed continuously, and its hold there was never seriously in doubt. What changed this week was that the DA’s strength spread far beyond its Western Cape heartland.

In eThekwini, the metropolitan municipality that includes the eastern port city of Durban, Zuma’s MK party led with about 41 per cent of the vote, with the ANC collapsing to below 20 per cent. The MK party had been tipped as one of the few parties capable of securing an outright majority in Durban, and although it fell short of that, its lead in the city that anchors KwaZulu-Natal’s economy was a striking statement of how far the ANC’s support has fractured in the province where Zuma’s political base has always been strongest.

Tshwane, the metropolitan municipality around the capital, Pretoria, was also too close to call, with no party near a majority. Across the country, the pattern was the same: the ANC down everywhere, the DA up in the cities, and MK sweeping up the ANC’s former supporters in KwaZulu-Natal.

A party braced for the verdict

The ANC’s leadership had spent the final days of the campaign trying to manage expectations. President Cyril Ramaphosa admitted in his weekly newsletter, “From the Desk of the President”, that “municipal failures have contributed to declining public trust and confidence in democratic governance”, according to Al Jazeera. At the party’s final rally, he rejected suggestions that the ANC was in decline and told supporters the party would prove its critics wrong. The count suggests voters heard the admission more clearly than the reassurance.

As the results came in, the ANC’s chairperson, Gwede Mantashe, argued that the picture was incomplete, telling reporters that “major areas, townships, and other areas have not been counted yet”, according to Reuters. By the time 87 per cent of districts had been counted, however, the ANC’s share had barely moved, and the remaining districts were not enough to change the story.

The party’s deputy secretary-general, Nomvula Mokonyane, struck a different note, framing the historic loss as an opportunity to renew the party. Speaking to the Daily Maverick at the IEC’s results centre in Midrand, she said the ANC would remain available to ensure stability in the cities and would be open to coalition talks with everybody. “We need to be inclusive,” she said. “We would want to be the bigger person in this.”

Coalition negotiations have already begun behind closed doors, according to reporting on the talks, with parties positioning themselves for control of municipalities and major cities. The DA’s Hill-Lewis confirmed that his party had already reached out to potential partners to assemble governing alliances. In Johannesburg, where no party will win an outright majority, the next mayor could be the DA’s Zille or ActionSA’s Mashaba, and both the ANC and the DA have already approached ActionSA, which said it had won 55 wards, according to the Daily Maverick.

The IEC is expected to announce the final results and the allocation of seats for the 257 municipal councils on Sunday 8 November. Councils will then have fourteen days to elect mayors and speakers, a deadline that falls on 22 November. Johannesburg, which has had six mayors in four years, will be watched most closely: its revolving door of coalitions and no-confidence votes has become a symbol of the instability that has followed the end of one-party rule in South Africa’s cities.

Thirty-two years of decline, compressed

The result is the culmination of a decline that has been visible for more than a decade but has accelerated sharply in the last five years. The ANC won nearly 70 per cent of the national vote in 2004, at the height of its dominance under former president Thabo Mbeki. It fell to 62 per cent in the 2011 municipal elections, then below 50 per cent for the first time in the 2021 municipal elections, when it won 46 per cent. In the 2024 national election it managed just over 40 per cent and lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994, forcing it into a coalition government with the DA and eight smaller parties.

Each step down has had the same causes, and voters have now delivered the same verdict on them at local level. Years of municipal mismanagement have left South Africans grappling with failing water supplies, persistent power cuts and crumbling public services, according to AFP. Corruption scandals have hollowed out public trust, while high crime rates and unemployment have deepened the sense that the party that promised a better life for all has stopped delivering it. The ANC itself has acknowledged its failures in local governance, but acknowledgement has not been enough to hold its vote.

The party has also been eaten away from within. The MK party, founded by Zuma in December 2023 after his expulsion from the ANC, took about 15 per cent of the vote in the 2024 national election and has now carried that support into local government, above all in KwaZulu-Natal. The EFF, founded by Malema after his own expulsion from the ANC, has been the other great splinter, although its fall to about 6 per cent in this election suggests its own moment may be passing. Together, the two breakaway parties have stripped the ANC of the voters it once took for granted, and this week’s results show that process is still running.

The national government the ANC leads has also been under strain from outside. The United States recently removed South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act’s duty-free trade scheme, a decision that threatened jobs in export industries and added to the economic pressure on the government. Ramaphosa has argued that the Democratic Party’s victories in this week’s United States midterm elections could reset relations with Washington, but that is a hope for the future, not a defence of the present.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. This was a verdict, not an accident

The most important fact about this election is not the ANC’s share of the vote. It is the turnout. For years, the ANC’s decline was partly cushioned by the fact that its disappointed supporters simply stayed at home. In 2021, fewer than half of registered voters bothered to vote, and the ANC’s losses were softened by the absence of its own base. This time, turnout rose to about 54.5 per cent, and the voters who came back did not come back to the ANC. As Oxford Economics’ Louw Nel observed to Reuters, they showed up and voted for someone else. That is a much harder verdict to dismiss than apathy, and it is why the ANC’s leadership will find it so difficult to explain this result away as a low-turnout protest vote. The voters were not absent. They were present, and they chose otherwise.

2. The coalition era has arrived in the cities

South Africa’s national government has been a coalition since June 2024, when the ANC lost its parliamentary majority and formed a government of national unity with the DA and eight smaller parties. What this week’s vote does is extend that reality to almost every major city in the country. Seven of the eight metros will have no outright winner, and the fourteen days after Sunday’s declaration will be filled with bargaining over mayors, speakers and committee chairs. The danger is that the cities repeat the experience of Johannesburg since 2021, where shifting coalitions, no-confidence motions and short-lived mayors have left the country’s economic hub effectively ungoverned for long stretches. The optimistic reading is that the national coalition has shown multi-party government can work at the top; the pessimistic one is that local coalitions have repeatedly shown it cannot work at the bottom. Which of those turns out to be true will be decided in the next fortnight, and it will matter more to ordinary South Africans than anything that happened at the ballot box.

3. Zuma’s revenge is now institutional

Jacob Zuma was expelled from the ANC, imprisoned for contempt of court, and written off by many as a spent force. His MK party’s performance this week — third nationally, first in eThekwini, and the largest party in KwaZulu-Natal — shows that his political project has outlasted every attempt to close it down. The MK party is no longer a protest vehicle for a single election. It is now the governing force in the country’s second-largest city and the dominant party in its second-most populous province, with councillors, budgets and patronage networks of its own. That changes the character of South African politics: the ANC’s great rival in KwaZulu-Natal is no longer a party it can absorb or outwait, but a permanent institution built from its own former members. It also raises a question the ANC has avoided answering for three years: whether it can ever win back voters who left not because they disagreed with the ANC’s policies, but because they followed a man the ANC cast out.

4. The DA’s opportunity — and its limit

The DA has every reason to celebrate this result. It leads in six of the eight metros, it has taken Johannesburg from the ANC, and it has grown its national share from 21.7 per cent in 2021 to about 25 per cent. But the result also exposes the limits of its advance. A quarter of the vote is not a mandate to govern alone, and in Johannesburg the DA will need ActionSA, the ANC, or both to install a mayor. The party’s dilemma is the same one it faces nationally: it is the most competent administrator in South African politics, and it is also a party whose support remains concentrated among minorities and the urban middle class. Governing Johannesburg will require it to share power with parties it has spent years attacking, and to do so in a city where the last five years of coalition government have been a byword for chaos. The DA’s test is no longer whether it can win votes. It is whether it can govern a city that has defeated every coalition that has tried.

5. Ramaphosa’s succession clock is now ticking loudly

Cyril Ramaphosa’s term as ANC leader ends at the party’s national conference in December 2027, and the succession battle that will decide his replacement is already under way. This result will shape it decisively. A president who led his party to 40 per cent nationally in 2024 and about 32 per cent locally in 2026 will face intense pressure from within the ANC, from the faction that blames his coalition with the DA for the party’s decline and from the faction that blames his failure to clean up the party fast enough. The irony is that Ramaphosa’s most honest moment of the campaign — his admission that municipal failures had eroded trust in democratic governance — was also the most damaging, because voters agreed with him and punished his party for it. The December 2027 conference will now be fought over a single question: whether the ANC can renew itself under a new leader, or whether this week’s result is the beginning of a long slide into being one party among many. The 2029 general election is less than three years away, and on this week’s numbers the ANC would enter it without a majority, without the cities, and without the certainty that it will ever govern alone again.

What to Watch Next

1. Sunday’s formal declaration: The IEC will announce the final results and seat allocations for all 257 councils on Sunday 8 November. The final percentages may move slightly from the near-final count, but the shape of the result is already settled. Watch for the final shares in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, where the ANC is projected to lose its position as the largest party.
2. The fourteen-day mayoral race: Councils have until 22 November to elect mayors and speakers. Johannesburg is the prize: the DA’s Helen Zille and ActionSA’s Herman Mashaba are the leading contenders, and the bargaining will reveal whether the ANC is prepared to govern as a junior partner in the city it once ruled outright.
3. Coalition stability in the metros: Seven of eight metros will be hung councils. The history of Johannesburg’s coalitions since 2021 — six mayors in four years — is a warning. Watch whether the parties agree on stable, written coalition agreements or fall back into the short-term deals that have paralysed the cities.
4. The national coalition: The ANC and the DA govern together nationally, but they are now rivals for the same cities. Watch whether the local contest strains the government of national unity, and whether either party uses its local position to extract concessions in Pretoria.
5. The ANC’s renewal debate: Expect a fierce internal argument inside the ANC in the weeks ahead, between those who say the party must break with the DA and those who say it must reform itself. The December 2027 leadership conference, and the succession to Ramaphosa, will be fought on the ground this election has laid bare.

Sources

• Reuters, “ANC’s ‘worst nightmare’ unfolds as its vote collapses”, via TechCentral, 5 November 2026
• Agence France-Presse, “ANC sinks to historic low after local polls”, via Cape Town Etc, 6 November 2026
• Bloomberg, “ANC on course for worst electoral showing yet”, via Moneyweb, 6 November 2026
• Reuters, “South Africa’s ANC faces record low with third of vote”, via News Central TV, 6 November 2026
• Al Jazeera, “South Africans vote in local elections seen as test for embattled ANC”, 4 November 2026
• Journalarta, “ANC faces bruising defeat as support falls below a third”, 6 November 2026