If there’s one truth emerging from the latest Joburg polling results, it’s that after November 4, there will be a coalition governing the country’s economic hub.
At the moment, the DA’s Helen Zille is, it would seem, far in the lead — but not yet strong enough to lay claim to an outright victory. The ANC, in chaos, has yet to nominate a mayoral candidate, with less than three months to the election, and would need a broad coalition to govern the city. Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA, then, may turn out to be a kingmaker.
This is a visceral reminder of the ANC’s descent. Gone are the heady days of 20 years ago, when it commanded 62% of the vote in a city whose fortunes remain emblematic of South Africa’s trajectory, responsible for nearly R1 of every R6 created in GDP.
Instead, polls by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) and The Common Sense show the party cratering to 18% support in July. This is a mark of the ANC’s descent in a city where the youth uprising in Soweto in 1976 rocketed South Africa onto the world media’s front pages, and where its headquarters, Luthuli House, is still housed.
Now, it’s important to treat those polling numbers with care. For a start, there’s a 4.4% margin of error, and polls are a snapshot in time, rather than a forecast of electoral outcomes. A lot can change, especially since the ANC hasn’t begun campaigning.
But the depth of the ANC’s plunge is alarming, even if it’s no great surprise. Bar about four years under DA control, the city’s governance has been dominated by the ANC, and it is on that party’s watch that there has been a steady erosion of capacity.
The figures paint a dismal picture. In 2017/2018, Joburg’s capital expenditure was R8.6bn, but by 2024/2025, it had shrunk to R7.4bn. Adjusted for inflation, that’s an effective decrease of about 30%.
Right now, that infrastructure backlog sits at a mammoth R220bn. This is evident in disintegrating roads (a backlog of about R115bn), chronic water cuts and leaks (R27bn), and electricity outages (more than R40bn).
And water might seem to be everywhere — spurting out of burst pipes, or leaking casually down main roads — but these losses cost residents R2.8bn last year. Nearly a third of the water is lost now, compared to a quarter in 2017.
It’s the same story with electricity. Losses have more than doubled to 30%, costing residents R5.7bn.
The list goes on: irregular expenditure is up more than 30% in real terms, consumer debts are up 140%-odd in real terms to R71bn, and R59bn has been set aside for impairments. It’s a tale of chronic mismanagement — and ample reason for political change.
But the question no-one can answer is: who will be in the mayoral chamber after November 4? Who will get into bed with whom, in other words, and who will leap out of bed at the first chance?
A match made in hell
With the DA comfortably in the lead and ActionSA holding steady at 10% in the SRF polls, a coalition between the parties could give it a majority. The MK Party sits at 13% and the EFF at 8%, but neither of these are logical bedfellows for the DA.
In other words, Zille and Mashaba could be each other’s salvation. But would their egos allow such a coalition to happen?
It would be a tough sell, since Mashaba’s antipathy for the blue party is a matter of long standing.
Speaking to the FM for this story, Mashaba called the DA’s mayoral candidate and former federal council chair Zille a “habitual liar”.
“What she says to you and what she practises are two different things, and she does it with a straight face,” he says.
And yet, despite the animosity between the parties, Mashaba says he is not in principle opposed to working with any party — including the DA — should that be what voters want, to give ActionSA an inroad to government.
In other words, a coalition between the DA and ActionSA is a real possibility, contrary to expectations.
Mashaba says his party has three preconditions for coalition negotiations: a tough line on corruption and undocumented migrants, and equal service delivery in all areas of the metro. So not completely antithetical to the DA.
“What we are saying to any political party, in the event that the numbers are such that you’ve got to work with us, these are our conditions,” he says.
That includes the DA — though he concedes it will be “very difficult. But let’s prepare to negotiate in good faith.”
This is somewhat of a U-turn, since Mashaba told the FM back in 2024 that the DA has always been a “very abusive, arrogant partner, but we tolerated them because we didn’t have an option”.
So what of the DA?
In an interview with the FM, Zille is cautious about the specifics of coalition partnerships — but she too doesn’t rule out a partnership with ActionSA.
“Nothing is off the table,” she says. “If you start by saying everything’s off the table, well, then you’re not going to have very good prospects. You don’t start by tying yourself up in knots.”
At the same time, she is a pragmatist, and is clear that “there’s no good coalition; you need to take the least bad”. But she is still holding out for a majority.
“If people want us to be able to govern in a stable government until 2031, then they need to give us enough votes to give us a majority of seats in the council. That’s 136 seats out of 270.”
At this point, a majority looks like a stretch — though there seems little doubt the DA will be the largest party in council.
It’s not just the SRF’s figures that point that way. Elections analyst Dawie Scholtz told a South Africa Brief podcast last week that his modelling puts the DA at about 39%, the ANC at 27%, the EFF at 9%, ActionSA at 7% and MK at 6%.
Of course it’s one thing to enter a coalition, another thing to remain in it. Here, Mashaba and Zille have history — and scars.
Back in 2021, ActionSA chose to co-govern with the DA in the three Gauteng metros, rather than cross the aisle to the opposition benches.
But things soon went south, and all three coalitions fell apart. In Tshwane, the last to fall, ActionSA accused the DA of going behind its back to negotiate with the ANC.
“I would not live in the same house with a wife that tried a plot to destroy me and be expected, because she failed, to stay in that relationship,” he said at the time of the decision.
For Mashaba, ActionSA is in politics to govern.
“We’re not in politics to sit in the opposition benches if we have the numbers,” he said in that interview with the FM. “So we will do everything possible to always ensure that wherever we participate … we get into government.”
Even now, as he entertains coalition options, Mashaba still fumes at how Zille is responsible for the wreck that is the City of Joburg. Then again, he was the mayor of Joburg from 2016 to 2019, and the verdict on that tenure is still very much out.
Failure to launch
But if the DA is to win a majority, or anything close to that, it could be a critical turning point for the party.
This is because, while the ANC has indeed floundered in Joburg, and alienated residents with woeful service delivery, the DA has failed to capitalise on this. Its best performance was in 2016, when it garnered 38% of the vote, but this dropped to 26% in 2021, and to 24% in Joburg in last year’s national election.
The problem for the party has been its inability so far to turn out the black vote — and, more recently, a fall-off in the coloured vote with the rise of Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance (PA).
Scholtz said the DA does well in predominantly white suburbia, where it is able to turn out its supporters. In 2016, for example, it secured 80% of the suburban Joburg vote off turnout of 67% in these areas. In 2021, turnout dropped back to 52%.
But this time, he said turnout could be closer to 2016’s figures, given the hype around this year’s polls, with the DA drawing in about 78% of this vote.
In majority black areas, such as the inner city and townships, turnout is much lower — 50% in 2016 and 37% in 2021. In those areas, the DA secured just 10% of the vote in 2016 — its breakout year — and it was down to 4% by 2021, he said.
This speaks to the central issue gnawing at the DA: its likeability problem.
This is evident in the polls. In the first quarter, SRF and The Common Sense polling had 84% of people surveyed saying they believed the areas they lived in would be improved under a DA administration, yet only 39% said they’d vote DA.
Asked about this, Zille says this discrepancy is explained by the fact that “not enough people yet vote on the issues”.
“The issues are: how do you improve service delivery? That’s the issue in a local government election. It’s how you get more reliable water, how you get more reliable electricity, how you fix the roads, how you get more reliable refuse removal,” she says.
“Those are all the issues, and people know that the DA would do a much better job, but people still find it very difficult to make the issues the issue.”
Independent political analyst Ralph Mathekga argues that identity — how the DA has built itself in post-apartheid South Africa — is the driver of this disconnect.
“This goes beyond service delivery, showing that service delivery is not sufficient,” he says. “Service delivery has to be brought about in a way that affirms the identity and … experience of those who receive the services.”
Like it or not, perceptions about the party’s wider track record will play a role in how the November election shakes out.
The South Africa Brief’s Paul Berkowitz tells the FM that the view that “black leaders are sidelined and black voters are not prioritised” by the DA also features in electoral choices. Here, the perception that the DA-run Cape Town has allocated more budget to richer and middle-class areas than uplifting poor ones hasn’t helped.
“On the one hand, there is a belief in a narrative that Zille is efficient and that she’ll bring stability and clean government to Joburg,” he says. “But on the other hand, [there is the belief] that she’s not going to prioritise — or a DA government with her leading it is not going to prioritise — underserviced areas in Joburg.”
True or not, it’s a view that Zille will have to grapple with.
Doomsday or bust
Where does all of this leave Joburg after November?
Analysts the FM spoke to say it’s a guessing game at this stage, with the numbers ambiguous enough that various plausible scenarios are in play: an ANC-led coalition; a DA-led coalition; or a DA-ANC coalition.
The first would constitute the municipal equivalent of the “doomsday coalition” that the DA warned about going into the 2024 national election. Here, the ANC could partner with the MK, the EFF, ActionSA and several small parties.
Scholtz’s numbers suggest much the same: the ANC, EFF, ActionSA and MK together would bring the coalition to 49%, he said; throw in the rats and mice, and this coalition could scrape over the line.
Of course, things could change once the ANC’s campaign machine finally creaks into life — at the time of publication it was already two months behind its own deadline to announce mayoral candidates, and it will announce its manifesto only on August 27. This is less than three months before the election.
But neither political analyst Susan Booysen nor Berkowitz sees that making a substantive difference. The party has simply left things too late, and voter sentiment has “hardened”, says Berkowitz.
By contrast, Zille hit the campaign trail last September already — notably, with a paddle in a Joburg pothole.
More to the point, Booysen believes the ANC is out of the kind of campaign ideas that would sway undecided or alienated voters.
“It has really exhausted the theme of ‘Give us another chance’, ‘We can do better together’, ‘We work with communities’ and the like … that just rings hollow by now,” she says.
The problem is that while the ANC has tried to present a picture of reinvigoration and cleaning up state institutions, the electorate isn’t convinced — particularly now, “while impeachment is unfolding, the Madlanga commission is unfolding, while evidence gathers almost daily of further things that need to be corrected”, she says.
A tie-up with a party such as MK won’t help its case, says Mathekga. In fact, he imagines a legitimacy crisis if such a coalition were to try to take a position on, say, corruption, with political rivals easily pointing to it as a “coalescence of the corrupt”.
For SRF director Frans Cronje, a tie-up between the ANC, MK, EFF and ActionSA might get a majority, “but it doesn’t alter the trajectory of the city much, in the sense that it’s unlikely to drive the kinds of reforms that will meet the expectations of people and therefore halt the fragmentation of the city”.
Still, the ANC is already in coalition with the EFF at the Gauteng provincial level, where premier Panyaza Lesufi has made it clear where his preference lies — and it is not with the DA. Given the defiant position of the ANC in Gauteng, a tie-up with the populists, in other words, is a real possibility too.
The idea of a broader coalition with former president Jacob Zuma’s party might be seductive for the ANC because, as Booysen tells it, this could help it regain power in a number of hung councils throughout the country.
As for the DA, even if things work in its favour, Scholtz sees it in a “grey zone” of about 39% of the vote — not enough to get over the line with its former coalition partners the ACDP and Freedom Front Plus.
The only way a DA coalition without the ANC would work would be with the inclusion of ActionSA, he said.
“Habitual liar” barbs or not, it may not be such an outlandish idea. The parties, after all, aren’t that far apart ideologically: fix basic services; clamp down on corruption; restore law and order by capacitating metro police; revive the economy and create jobs through infrastructure development, cutting red tape and the like.
Though, to be fair, few parties would argue against any of those ideas.
The real sticking point is the animosity and lack of trust — what Cronje calls a “vendetta” unlike anything he’s ever seen; “a frightening thing”.
This is why Cronje reckons a coalition between the DA and ActionSA won’t happen. “It’s so difficult that I don’t believe it can work, and I believe a lot of things …”
Mathekga says hostility is to be expected, given that ActionSA is essentially a splinter from the DA and has defined itself in opposition to the party. Nonetheless, “when reality hits”, it’s not too far-fetched that the two will find each other, he says. And if a tie-up would guarantee a majority, it’s possible, if difficult, says Booysen.
On the issue of political manoeuvring and ActionSA’s reliability, pragmatism, Mathekga says, will come to the fore. If ActionSA is a recalcitrant coalition partner, this will “erode [its] credibility and reliability in the eyes of the voters”.
Berkowitz believes that while such a coalition would be supported most by the media and the market, “there would still be friction between the two parties and about how to allocate the budget, and how and where to spend the budget”, he says.
Ultimately, it will all come down to whether ActionSA can overcome its distaste for the DA — and whether the DA can look beyond ActionSA’s behaviour in booting it from power when it pulled out of the governing coalition in Tshwane.
But where will ActionSA plant its flag?
A 10% party is not without sway. But in a coalition of multiple parties, as would be the case if it partners with the ANC rather than the DA, its influence may be diluted.
As Berkowitz says: “If ActionSA is just one medium-sized party with a whole bunch of other parties like the PA and the IFP in an ANC-headed coalition, I don’t know how much leverage they would have.”
He believes Mashaba’s party would have more influence with a DA-led coalition, where it would look for positions on the mayoral council — a deputy mayoral position at least, and probably speaker. But if the two can’t resolve their deeper leadership tensions, it would be a deeply fragile relationship.
Last week on social media, a combative Mashaba posted: “Helen will not become mayor of [Joburg] now, including in her next life.”
It’s fighting talk certainly; campaigning bombast, possibly. But it may suggest that ActionSA would seek to leverage its power into a mayoral seat — as it did with the ANC in Tshwane — or at least into a compromise candidate in a coalition.
“If the ANC senses that is the situation between the DA and ActionSA, then it could go in there and offer them the mayorship of Joburg,” says Booysen. “That’s the way these coalitions work … it’s the brutal trade-offs.”
Still, Mathekga is hesitant about any coalition with the ANC which, he reckons, is damaged goods.
“ActionSA will have a lot to explain if they go along with the ANC and less explaining to do if they go with the DA,” he says. “The ANC is already a liability for any party to work with if there is a choice for an alternative partner. I think ActionSA will take that into consideration.”
The people’s choice?
Cronje worries about any coalition that freezes out the ANC, however.
“[The ANC] represents the views of millions of people, and I think it’s dangerous to … push the ANC into the wilderness and try to carry on without it,” he says. “Whatever one may think of its present efforts and those of the past decade, it carries the hopes and dreams and aspirations of millions of people.”
To his mind, an ANC-DA coalition makes the most sense — most obviously because the electorate likes the idea.
The SRF/Common Sense polling found that nationally, 50% of voters would strongly support a DA-ANC tie-up in the event of hung councils; that percentage rises to about 70% among ANC voters, and is at about 40% among DA voters.
Add in the number of people who would “somewhat agree” on a coalition between the ANC and DA, and you’ve got broad support.
“ANC voters like the DA when it’s in coalition with the ANC, and the DA voters like the ANC when it’s in coalition with the DA far more than they like each other or the idea of each other when they’re not,” he says.
The reason ANC supporters back the idea, Cronje says, stems from the perception of competence in the DA.
That, perhaps, could explain the discrepancy between the 84% who thought the DA would govern better in their areas and the 39% who said they’d actually vote for it.
Berkowitz also doesn’t rule out the chance of a DA-ANC coalition. “If the ANC does particularly badly — they fall below 25% or even 20% — and you’ve got the DA on 40%, then that’s like a mirror image of the GNU, but with the DA driving it,” he says.
Of course, the ANC would struggle to join a coalition as the junior partner and be told what to do by the DA, he says.
Still, given the state of Joburg, and the ANC’s culpability for that, there will surely be at least some in the DA who rail against such a coalition.
Booysen reckons the DA could easily mitigate this by pointing to the alternative: an EFF/MK tie-up — “the ANC is the lesser evil generally for the DA than MK and the EFF are”.
If the DA can secure core portfolios, and demonstrate an ability to turn the city around, it should be able to bring a reluctant constituency on board.
Zille is pragmatic on the question of selling coalitions to its constituency.
“What you do is you have to say to them: ‘Well, we didn’t get enough votes to govern outright. If we got enough votes to govern with a clear majority, 136 seats out of 270, we wouldn’t have to go into a coalition. You didn’t give us enough votes, so now we have to take the least worst choice.’”
Hoping for a miracle
Much on that day in November will come down to voter turnout.
The DA has a good track record of turning out its voters, and the closeness of the election may see more constituents cast their ballots. (Scholtz, for one, puts the difference between a 50% and 65% turnout for the DA in the suburbs as a difference of three to four percentage points.)
The ANC is historically less successful on turnout.
Cronje says that for black middle-class voters, “the chances are very good that they are now thinking of voting for the DA, even if they’re not doing so already”. Equally, the ANC has also lost votes to the MK and EFF, “and a lot have just faded away”.
But a low turnout in the predominantly black areas will not be enough to get the DA over the line. In Scholtz’s view, an outright DA majority would take a “miracle”.
For the party to move the needle substantially to get out of the grey zone, said Scholtz, “there’s either a miracle in the black electorate or the coloured electorate, and both probably, or a miracle in the relationship with Mashaba”.
Failing that, he sees “more of the same” – “a kind of ANC chaos coalition”.
For dispirited Joburgers, a governing coalition that gets the lights on, the water running and the roads fixed will be something of a miracle in itself.
