Mistra report names Johannesburg as South Africa’s coalition chaos capital

Johannesburg has emerged alongside Karoo Hoogland as the most turbulent municipality in South Africa’s post-2021 coalition era, with both municipalities going through six administrations, according to the 2026 Mistra Coalitions Barometer.

The report examined 80 municipalities that became hung at some point after the 2021 local government elections.

“Many other municipalities, however, have experienced considerable political turmoil,” the report says.

“Across the 80 municipalities in the dataset, 46 have gone through more than one administration, and the two most turbulent, Johannesburg and Karoo Hoogland, have each gone through six.”

Of the 101 endings, 58 were collapses, in which the coalition’s largest member lost office

— Mistra report

The report cautions that a change of administration is not necessarily the same as a coalition collapse.

“Of the 101 endings, 58 were collapses, in which the coalition’s largest member lost office,” it says.

“In 38 the coalition was rebuilt around the same anchor party, which kept the mayoralty in 29 of them.”

Mistra found that nine of the 19 metro administrations included in its statistical model had collapsed — a rate of 47%, compared with 34% elsewhere.

“Coalition government in the metros is markedly less stable than elsewhere,” the report says.

“Coalition politics in metropolitan councils such as Johannesburg and Tshwane generates a large volume of media coverage, and the popular image of the metros is often one of turmoil and ‘coalition chaos’.”

“The dataset shows that there is a large amount of truth to this characterisation.”

Across the 175 administrations examined, the median metro administration lasted 338 days, compared with 735 days elsewhere.

“In the model, metro status carries a risk multiplier of about 2.1,” the report says.

Overall, metro status and coalition complexity are correlated in the data-set, but there are too few metro collapses in the 2026 dataset to reliably separate their effects

— Mistra report

Mistra also found that metro coalitions tended to be more complex.

Among governments that held a majority, metro administrations contained an average of 3.4 veto players, compared with 2.3 in non-metro administrations.

“In the secondary model fitted to the 93 administrations where the count is meaningful, each additional veto player was associated with collapse at about 1.25 times the rate,” the report says.

However, Mistra said the data could not establish all the reasons for the higher instability in metros.

“Overall, metro status and coalition complexity are correlated in the data-set, but there are too few metro collapses in the 2026 dataset to reliably separate their effects,” it says.

Despite the political instability, the report found no statistically reliable association between coalition collapses and municipal audit outcomes.

The research compared each municipality’s 2024/2025 audit outcome with the number of coalition collapses it had experienced during the preceding four years.

The comparison covered 78 of the 80 municipalities because two 2024/2025 audits were still incomplete.

Mistra says the collapse of a governing administration is “the strongest signal of instability defined in the Coalitions Barometer dataset”.

The Auditor-General of South Africa’s audit outcomes, meanwhile, measure “the quality of a municipality’s record-keeping and its compliance with other elements of municipal financial statutes”.

This could mean that local governments have done a better-than-expected job of insulating their technical capacity from instability at the political level

— Mistra report

The report says these outcomes provide “a useful proxy for administrative effectiveness in South African local government”.

“There is no statistically reliable association between coalition collapses and audit outcomes.

“Before the test was run, the prior assumption was that municipalities that had experienced repeated cycles of ‘coalition chaos’ (with governments moving in and out of office) would suffer a degradation of their administrative capacity, and that this would show up at the end of the period in the form of worse audit outcomes,” the report says.

“However, the test did not find this.”

Of the municipalities assessed, 46 had stable audit outcomes, 19 improved and 13 declined.

Two municipalities — Maluti-a-Phofung and Nala — could not be placed because their 2024/2025 audits were still pending.

Mistra cautions that the finding does not settle the broader question of how coalition instability affects governance.

“This could mean that local governments have done a better-than-expected job of insulating their technical capacity from instability at the political level,” the report says.

“It could also mean that new variables or a different research design will be needed to understand how coalition instability affects the quality of governance — this is only a first look.”

Minority governments were common in the municipalities examined by Mistra, but the report found they were significantly less durable than governments with a majority.

Across all 175 administrations, minority government was the most common size category, accounting for 82 administrations, or 46.9%.

However, they accounted for only 38.8% of governing time because they tended to be shorter-lived.

Minority governments are common, but they are rarely durable, and the arrangements that sustain them over the long run are the exception rather than the rule

— Mistra report

Their median lifespan was 529 days, compared with 959 days for other administrations.

“Minority governments are common, but they are rarely durable, and the arrangements that sustain them over the long run are the exception rather than the rule,” the report says.

Of the 82 minority governments in the dataset, 34 had collapsed by the cut-off, compared with 24 of the 93 governments that held a majority.

Mistra’s modelling put the difference at nearly three times the collapse rate of a comparable majority coalition.

“Unsurprisingly, the Coalitions Barometer dataset shows that minority governments tended to be fragile,” the report says.

Six minority governments formed in 2021 were still in office at the data cut-off:

- eNdumeni;

- Govan Mbeki;

- Emfuleni;

- Msunduzi;

- Newcastle; and

- Rustenburg.

Their lifespan was 1,559 days.

The report identifies two mechanisms through which minority governments can survive:

- The first is a supporter-sustained minority government, where a party outside the governing coalition agrees to keep it in office without joining it.

- The second is a minority government that survives because the opposition is fragmented.

“The clearest instance in this dataset is Emfuleni,” the report says, where the ANC governed one seat short of a majority from 2021 to the data cut-off “with no support arrangement that could be discerned from the record, and survived two motions of no confidence”.

Mistra also found that minority coalitions without an outside supporter were particularly vulnerable.

“Minority coalitions that lacked a supporter collapsed at about three times the rate of those that had one.”

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