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South Africa's governing party is heading for the worst election result in its history. With about 80% of ballots counted in Wednesday's local government elections, the African National Congress stood at just 31.8% of the national vote on Friday — below a third for the first time, and far below the 46% it won at the last municipal elections in 2021. Final results are expected on Sunday, but the direction is already clear: the party that has governed South Africa since the end of apartheid is losing its grip on the country's cities.
The numbers so far
The election authority's dashboard put the ANC at 31.8% with 80% of votes counted, still the largest party but by a shrinking margin. The pro-business, centre-right Democratic Alliance was second with 24.2%, and former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe party — contesting local elections for the first time — was third with just over 9%. A later count, with 87% of voting districts in, showed the ANC at 31.73%, the DA at 23.99% and MK at 9.41%. Projections by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, a state-funded research body, put the ANC's final share at nearly 32%. This would be its lowest score yet, after just over 40% at the 2024 national polls and 46% at the 2021 municipal elections.
Turnout tells its own story. About 15.9 million of 29.2 million registered voters cast ballots — an estimated 54.5%, up from 46% in the pandemic-hit 2021 local elections. South Africans turned out in larger numbers, and they turned against the governing party. The local ballot is widely read as a measure of the national mood before the next general election in 2029, and the mood it measures is anger: years of municipal mismanagement that have left people grappling with failing water supplies, persistent power cuts and crumbling public services.
Where the ANC is losing
The damage is worst where it matters most. In Johannesburg, the country's commercial capital and biggest city, the DA was ahead with 40% of the vote against the ANC's 17.5%, with ActionSA on 15.5%. In eThekwini, the municipality that includes Durban, Zuma's MK party led with 41%. The ANC was also on course to lose its position as the largest party in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, the two most populous provinces. Coalition talks are expected in city after city, as no single party looks likely to govern alone in the big metros.
The result fits a pattern voters delivered elsewhere this week — American voters handed the Democrats a midterm sweep days earlier — but South Africa's verdict is sharper, because it is aimed at a party, not a president. The ANC, led by President Cyril Ramaphosa, has borne the brunt of criticism for services that stopped working: taps that run dry, lights that go out, roads and clinics left to decay. Voters did not stay home this time. They came out, and they voted for someone else.
What happens next
The Electoral Commission is expected to announce final results on Sunday, once counting and verification are complete, and the remaining votes could still shift the margins — the figures in this article are partial and provisional. But no plausible final count restores the ANC to anything like its old dominance, and the party now faces the same question in Pretoria that it faces in Johannesburg and Durban: how to govern in coalition, with rivals it used to beat outright. For a movement that won 62% of the vote in the first democratic elections of 1994, 32% is not just a bad night. It is the end of an era — delivered, fittingly, by the voters it once took for granted. Paraguay's voters watched their own president fall this week too, but South Africa's verdict was quieter, and in its own way more final: no drama, no scandal, just a number.
Sources: The Times of Israel (AFP) and Vanguard (AFP).