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The party that led South Africa out of apartheid has just recorded the worst election result in its history. The African National Congress won 30.76 percent of the vote in last week's municipal elections, according to final results announced on Sunday — down from 45.59 percent in 2021 and less than half the 66 percent it commanded two decades ago. The ANC remains the country's largest party, but only just. Its own secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, did not mince words: he called the outcome "catastrophic".
The scale of the fall is hard to overstate. In South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, the party of Nelson Mandela captured nearly two-thirds of the vote. In 2006 it won 66 percent. On Wednesday, voters chose the councillors who run the country's eight biggest cities and its 44 district and 205 local municipalities — and in most of them, the ANC no longer commands a majority. More than half of South Africa's 213 councils produced no outright winner, forcing parties into coalition negotiations. They have 14 days to agree before city councils are formed.
Where the ANC lost
The damage was worst where it matters most. The ANC lost its place as the largest party to the Democratic Alliance in Johannesburg, the economic hub, where the DA won about 35 percent against the ANC's 20 percent; in the capital, Pretoria; and in Ekurhuleni, the large municipality east of Johannesburg. In Durban, former President Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe party overtook the ANC. The DA kept outright control of Cape Town — the only one of the eight major cities where any party won a majority. Nationally, the ANC won a majority in only one of South Africa's nine provinces, Limpopo, compared with six in 2021, and took the most votes in only two of the eight major cities, down from six.
Turnout told its own story. At 52 percent, it was six points higher than in the Covid-hit 2021 municipal elections — South Africans did not stay home; they turned out to punish the governing party. One municipality will have to vote again after party supporters stormed a polling station and destroyed ballot papers.
Why voters walked away
The reasons were not abstract. As Al Jazeera reported, water shortages, electricity outages and poor service delivery dominated the ballot. Mbalula himself conceded the point: "Communities have gone without water. Refuse has not been collected. Roads have not been maintained." Corruption scandals have compounded the anger, including the "Farmgate" affair, in which burglars broke into President Cyril Ramaphosa's luxury private ranch in 2020 and stole $580,000 hidden inside furniture.
The decline has been steady for more than a decade, but it has accelerated. In 2021 the ANC fell below 50 percent in an election for the first time; in 2024 it lost its parliamentary majority for the first time and was forced into a government of national unity with the DA and other parties. Sunday's result confirms that the 2024 shock was not a one-off. The DA, its main rival and its partner in the national unity government, finished second with 24.64 percent, while Zuma's MK party took 9.76 percent and the Economic Freedom Fighters 6.22 percent.
What comes next
The immediate test is coalition-building in the big cities, above all Johannesburg, where the DA's lead gives it a strong claim to lead the municipal government — but where no party can govern alone. Mbalula said the ANC "would not go begging for positions", a hint that the talks will be hard. The longer question is whether a liberation movement that has governed South Africa for 32 years can rebuild trust on the basics — water, power, roads, refuse — before the next national election. The voters' message on Wednesday was blunt, and the ANC's own leadership has now said it out loud: catastrophic. The party that once seemed permanent in South African politics now has to prove, city by city, that it still deserves to govern.
Sources: Al Jazeera; CNBC Africa.