Democracy is weakening globally. According to the Global State of Democracy Initiative, 54% of all countries assessed in 2025 suffered a decline in at least one factor of democratic performance and only 32% advanced in at least one factor. Factors are organised around four core categories of democratic performance — representation, rights, rule of law and participation — and include credible elections or judicial independence.
South Africa has not regressed on paper, but citizens are increasingly disillusioned with democracy, as shown by a Human Sciences Research Council study in March. It found that popular support for democracy is at historic lows, declining from 65% in the mid-2000s to 36% in 2025/2026. The data corroborates Afrobarometer research, which found that preferences for democracy in South Africa declined by 30 percentage points between 2011 and 2021.
At the heart of the disillusionment one finds a stagnant economy, record-high unemployment, the rising cost of living and collapsing services.
It is against this backdrop that former president Jacob Zuma’s MK Party entered the mix, winning a staggering 2.3-million votes in 2024. Zuma’s ascent is confounding, since South Africa’s economic regression took hold when he took up the presidency in 2009 and bottomed out under the weight of state capture during his tenure.
Yet Zuma’s MK is now poised to become the largest party in the country’s third-largest city, eThekwini, and to emerge among the top three parties in the local government elections. The Social Research Foundation (SRF) and The Common Sense are polling MK at 15% nationally and 33% in eThekwini, just three months out from the November 4 elections.
Their polling also shows that the ANC’s support is in a death spiral, leaving it with no choice but to enter coalitions either with its current GNU partners, including the DA, or the more populist alternatives of MK, the EFF and ActionSA.
SRF director Frans Cronje, a long-time researcher and political analyst, warns that South Africans should not be fooled by MK’s perceived internal instability. The party’s top leadership is frequently shifted around, with Zuma’s son and former Gupta employee Duduzane Zuma appointed MK’s first deputy president last week.
“I think the party is well run. Zuma always reshuffled his cabinet. That looked like turmoil from without, but it was a very effective means of preventing any internal opposition building up or the risk of sabotage,” he says.
Second, MK’s shrewd entanglement with the anti-immigrant movement has proved an effective campaign platform.
“Given the 30%-plus unemployment rate, it … gives them an emotive economic platform,” Cronje says.
“South Africa is a conservative right-of-centre society. MK broadly speaks to that, and it resonates in a way that the bulk of the private donor-funded opposition parties won’t because the donors are chiefly left-of-centre, New York-style democrats!”
Still, Cronje doesn’t believe voters would support the idea of booting the DA out of the GNU in favour of MK and the EFF.
“The fear is that that would make conditions in the country worse. At face value, therefore, I put a contradiction to you: MK is well and shrewdly run and growing, but voters don’t want it in the GNU.
“How can that be? The answer is that MK, as with the EFF before it, channels frustrations of disappointed ANC voters who are angry that the ANC just won’t get the economy going.”
The straightforward fix
Insiders in the ANC express concern about the internal instability and volatility of Zuma’s party, about the kind of compromises the ANC would have to make if it went into a coalition with MK (or, put bluntly, what it would cost), and about how MK’s ideological incoherence and vacillation would render it difficult to predict and, therefore, to manage.
Despite this, there are powerful ANC structures and leaders who believe the only acceptable coalition arrangement for the ANC is with MK and the EFF. A clear example of this is the ANC in Gauteng under Panyaza Lesufi, who Zuma’s party kept in office by voting against a motion of no confidence in his premiership (brought by the DA).
To sidestep the hard choices, Cronje says the ANC has an easy route back to an outright majority, potentially by 2034: lifting the investment rate to grow the economy and create jobs.
“The investment rate is so absurdly low that it really is not difficult to lift it. Take it to just 20% and I’m certain you’ll be competing for 50% of the vote; take it to 25% and you will win the 2034 election with 55%-plus.”
Cronje says it would be a “strategic mistake, a misread of the balance of forces” for the ANC to think it is doomed to a coalition future and that its choice is between MK or the DA (or becoming a minority government).
But as long as the ANC remains locked in short-term survival mode, it will remain in a dilemma: trapped in either an ideological echo chamber with the DA or entertaining the dodgy vendetta project of a former jilted leader in the form of MK.
Marrian is a political analyst with the Bureau for Economic Research
