The ANC’s failure to submit its candidate lists to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) on time — affecting six municipalities, including two Eastern Cape strongholds and the metro of Mangaung — represents progress for the party.
In 2021, the ANC failed to submit lists for 93 municipalities. It was set to lose 25 councils outright because of the internal list chaos.
The party was saved by the IEC’s bid to the Constitutional Court to shift the election due to Covid restrictions. The court ultimately decided that the election had to go ahead within its constitutionally prescribed date, but it did allow the IEC to overhaul its electoral calendar and reopen the candidate list submission process.
Not that the reprieve was enough to entirely save the party: its support declined by almost eight percentage points nationally, compared with 2016 — a harbinger of the 2024 national election, when it lost its outright majority and was forced into a coalition.
The 2021 election was also a tough one for the DA. Its support declined by five percentage points compared with 2016, with the vote fragmenting between smaller, mostly new political parties. More startling was the dramatic slide in voter turnout; fewer than half of all registered voters cast their ballots.
In the five years since, the major cities have experienced deep tumult and dire service delivery due to messy coalitions, with one-seat parties asserting themselves. Joburg, for example, twice had mayors from Al Jama-ah, a party that won less than 1% of the vote in council.
The question is whether the fragmentation that characterised 2021 will continue into the 2026 election season.
For elections analyst Wayne Sussman, 2021 was a sign of things to come. He has conducted a ward-by-ward analysis of the performance of the major parties since that election and is confident that both the ANC and the DA are in trouble, even in their traditionally dominant wards.
“If you think back to the 2016 local government election, it was the ANC, the DA, the EFF, and to some extent the IFP. If you fast-forward to 2021, you see parties like the Patriotic Alliance [PA], ActionSA, the Freedom Front Plus … re-enter the conversation. And then in the last election … [there] was the arrival of the MK Party,” he says.
In 2016, 11 parties won seats in Joburg; this increased to 18 in 2021. However, the number of parties contesting in the city increased dramatically from 28 in 2016 to 56 in 2021. A whopping 80 parties are registered in the city for November 4.
“So if we again go granular, you see this fragmentation in Joburg, in Ekurhuleni,” Sussman says.
“There is a real fragmentation taking place and this is why even if the ANC had a total rock star [as its mayoral candidate] and the DA … does have a rock star on the ballot [in Helen Zille], it remains extremely difficult to see a path for these two major urban parties to [reach] 50% by themselves in the three Gauteng metros, and even in a place like Nelson Mandela Bay,” he says.
This becomes clear, Sussman argues, when you look at how the vote has splintered in former ANC strongholds across Gauteng, such as Vosloorus and Katlehong, where the party is facing a serious threat from MK. In wards around universities and in inner cities, the EFF looms large. Then there are the multiple other new parties on the scene; ActionSA, for example, is contesting every ward in the country for the first time.
“So seats which are typically safe ANC seats are now in play in this election, and even if the ANC might hold on to the vast majority of these seats, it’s quite unthinkable, when you go back to 2021 even, that places like Katlehong, like Vosloorus, parts of Alexandra are all now in play in this election,” he says. “This is a very different election.”
The DA is in a similar position, facing threats from smaller players in some of its traditional strongholds, the most serious of which is the meteoric rise of the PA across the Western Cape.
Politically, much has shifted in both the ANC and the DA since 2021: President Cyril Ramaphosa consolidated his grip on the ANC at its national congress in 2022, and the DA elected a new leader in Geordin Hill-Lewis in April this year. The formation of the GNU, in which the ANC and DA are central, is another huge shift.
For both parties, a reconsolidation of their share of the vote would be an ideal outcome — but on this score, voters alone will have the ultimate say on November 4.
Marrian is a political analyst with the Bureau for Economic Research
