ANC facing further losses in South Africa’s local elections

The African National Congress, the former liberation movement of Nelson Mandela that ruled South Africa for decades after apartheid ended, is expected to tumble deeper into minority status as votes are counted in local elections this week.

Wednesday’s elections are likely to confirm the ANC’s long-term decline, leaving power increasingly fragmented in the hands of smaller parties. Among them are populist anti-immigration parties that will wield stronger influence in emerging coalitions in many cities and towns across the country, polls suggest.

Early results on Wednesday night showed the ANC running well below the 46 per cent that it captured in the last local election in 2021, although only a small fraction of votes have been counted so far.

The ANC, which battled to topple the white-minority regime during the apartheid era, brought Mr. Mandela to power as the country’s first democratically elected president in 1994 and then dominated South African politics for the next three decades. Its eroding popularity led to the loss of its national majority in 2024, forcing it into a coalition with opposition parties, and it now faces a surge of similar setbacks at the local level.

The second-biggest party in recent elections, the Democratic Alliance, warned that “coalition chaos” will cause instability in many municipalities. But with polls predicting no clear winner in the local elections, the political turmoil is likely to continue. Several polls have found the ANC running barely ahead of the DA in electoral support, with neither close to a majority in most of the larger cities.

Growing dissatisfaction with the biggest parties has led to the creation of a slew of new parties. Wednesday’s election was one of the most fractious in South African history, contested by 546 parties and nearly 137,000 candidates.

“My view is that we’ve never really in years had a local government election like this, where we have so many parties, so many South Africans interested in representing our people,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told journalists after casting his vote in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Earlier in the week, he conceded that the failures of many local governments – including widespread corruption and poor municipal services – have “contributed to declining public trust and confidence in democratic governance.”

At least 50 people have been killed in political violence in South Africa since the beginning of this year, mostly within the ANC – a higher death toll than any previous national or local election in the past decade.

“Contestations over power and access to resources in local government have contributed to acts of violence, including disruptions of council meetings and the killings of ward candidates, councillors and municipal officials,” Mr. Ramaphosa said in a pre-election statement on Monday.

In the country’s biggest city, Johannesburg, the near collapse of municipal services has angered many residents. Some neighbourhoods have gone weeks or months without a regular water supply. Broken streetlights have left major roads and highways in darkness, garbage went uncollected because of a labour dispute, and the national government was threatening to take control of the city’s administration because of mismanagement by the ANC and its coalition partners.

Last weekend, Johannesburg’s city government introduced what it called a “throttling schedule” to reduce the water supply in many neighbourhoods. Poor maintenance has meant that about a third of all water in the city is lost to leaks and burst pipes.

At a meeting with ANC councillors last year, Mr. Ramaphosa made headlines by acknowledging that South Africa’s best-performing local governments were not run by the ANC.

More recently, the ANC has been in such disarray that it was unable to announce its mayoral candidates before the election. Instead, its campaign posters featured a photo of Mr. Ramaphosa, who is not on any local election ballot.

A poll of 3,600 South Africans, conducted by Ipsos last month, found that about half of respondents could not identify any political party that represents their views. Two-thirds said politicians cannot be trusted.

“Voters are disappointed, disillusioned and frustrated with the situation in the country, especially with lack of service delivery,” Ipsos political analyst Mari Harris said in a report on the poll.

Because of growing fragmentation in the electorate, coalitions will become a “defining feature” of the political landscape, Ipsos said. Most of the biggest cities will need weeks of negotiations to settle their new coalition arrangements, it said.

A South African think tank, the Institute for Security Studies, cited the recent surge in hostility to foreign migrants – one of the most visible trends in South African politics this year – as a symptom of a growing disaffection and alienation from the country’s democratic system.