[Opinion] ANC heads for 30% in local government elections

Running out of ideas and unwilling to shake up patronage networks and vested interests, the ANC is heading towards 30% of the vote nationally in the 2026/27 local government elections.

 

Add to the mix the pressure emanating from the Donald Trump White House and at present the probability lies towards the party leaning into areas of comfort, where it can still feel it is a moral superpower.

 

The ANC, and President Cyril Ramaphosa specifically, are likely to seek solace in events such as the national dialogue and on the international stage, where Ramaphosa can demonstrate his statesmanship while remaining above the petty squabbles of vicious domestic politics. The ANC participated enthusiastically in the latest iteration of the Liberation Movements Summit, with comfortable buzzwords the order of the day: “economic justice”, “beneficiation” and “the creation of jobs for our youth”.

 

Unfortunately for SA businesses and citizens — among whom are many disillusioned ANC voters — the ANC’s defaulting to old, comfortable “liberation” alliances and rhetoric will not fix service delivery decline in most of the country’s major metros. Furthermore, those warm feelings will not serve the party in dealing effectively with shocks administered to global trade and geopolitics by the Trump administration.

 

In the 2019 Gauteng provincial election the ANC attained 50.1%; in 2024 this dropped to 34.8%. In KwaZulu-Natal the party won 54.2% in 2019, declining to 17% in last year’s elections. The ANC’s prospects in both Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal are dire at best. Despite the MK party’s leadership challenges of late, it will be difficult for the ANC to win back support from MK in KwaZulu-Natal.

 

In Gauteng the political space has become more competitive. This, coupled with the possibility that Helen Zille’s mayoral run in Johannesburg could lead the DA to be the biggest party in the metro, the ANC’s prospects in the most economically important province are teetering on the edge. Its own leadership figures in both provinces have shown little ability to tackle even the most basic service delivery problems that plague the metros in those provinces.

 

Meanwhile, in SA’s third most economically important province, the Western Cape, the ANC’s proposed answer to its precipitous electoral decline in that province is to hand the leadership reins to “new” old leaders, with former public enterprises minister Lynne Brown and former US ambassador Ebrahim Rasool tapped as potential interim leaders.

 

The national and provincial declines of the ANC are replicated in by-elections. According to electoral analyst Paul Berkowitz, since the 2021 local government election the ANC has lost 20 seats to the IFP, 10 seats to the EFF, seven seats to MK, six each to the PA and DA, and other seats to independent candidates. The party is about 40 wards lighter than it was four years ago through by-elections alone.

 

From 11.6-million votes in 2009 to 11.4-million in 2014, 10-million in 2019 and 6.4-million in 2024, the ANC’s decline has been steady. There is scant evidence from the party’s rhetoric or actions in 2025 to convince that ANC support will not decline further in the next local government elections and into the 2029 general election.

 

To alleviate some of the pressure and turn around its weakening image the ANC, and Ramaphosa especially, will place some hope in initiatives such as the national dialogue. However, electorally the risk for the party is that such a platform will simply serve as another opportunity for South Africans to highlight the many challenges with which they have to deal daily and to point to the ANC as “accused number one.”

 

Every time parliament sits the country engages in a national dialogue; every by-election, local, provincial and national election serves as a form of national dialogue. But it’s one thing for South Africans to voice their concerns and various challenges, quite another for this iteration of the ANC to act upon those concerns in a meaningful manner. And ever more ANC supporters are coming to this realisation.