ANC falls to weakest result since 1994 as South African local elections leave cities hung

South Africa's governing African National Congress recorded its weakest showing since it first took power in 1994, as the Electoral Commission of South Africa confirmed final results from the November 4 local government elections on Sunday evening. The ANC remained the largest party nationally but finished with 30.76 percent of the vote, well below the roughly 46 percent it won in the last municipal elections in 2021, while the Democratic Alliance rose to 24.64 percent and uMkhonto weSizwe, the party founded by former president Jacob Zuma, took first place in Durban's eThekwini metro in its first local contest.

The result leaves most of South Africa's 213 municipal councils, including the country's largest cities, without a party holding an outright majority, setting up weeks of coalition bargaining that will determine who governs Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and several other metros for the next five years.

A fractured national picture

According to the final count, the ANC took 3,246 council seats nationally, the DA 1,695, uMkhonto weSizwe 785, the Economic Freedom Fighters 588 and ActionSA 313, with independents and smaller parties accounting for the remainder. The Inkatha Freedom Party and ActionSA each emerged as the governing party in a handful of municipalities outside the metros, while a small regional party, Rise Tsantsabane Communities, took outright control of one Northern Cape council.

More than 15.6 million South Africans cast ballots, the commission said, with 188,000 staff running 23,696 voting stations and printing more than 100 million ballot papers for the country's seventh democratic local government elections. The commission's chief electoral officer, Sy Mamabolo told the state news agency SAnews that the body had deployed 56,000 electronic voter management devices nationwide, 16,000 more than in 2021, calling the devices "the technological backbone of our voting operations."

Coalition talks will now determine control of most major cities. The DA won an outright majority only in Cape Town, taking 56.42 percent of the vote, short of the 58 percent that incumbent mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis had predicted before the polls. Everywhere else among the metros, no single party cleared 50 percent.

Metro by metro

In Johannesburg, the country's largest city and financial hub, the DA finished first with 34.79 percent, ahead of the ANC on 20.25 percent and ActionSA on 16.27 percent, leaving the DA needing a partner to form an administration. In Tshwane, which includes the capital Pretoria, the DA led with 34.37 percent, but ActionSA's 22.07 percent and the ANC's 20.22 percent gave the two parties, together with smaller allies, enough seats to potentially reinstall the existing coalition government led by mayor Nasiphi Moya. In Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg, the DA again led on 30.68 percent without a majority.

Durban's eThekwini metro produced the most striking single result: uMkhonto weSizwe topped the poll with 38.29 percent, ahead of the DA's 25.45 percent and the ANC's 16.43 percent, but fell more than ten points short of outright control in the party's first appearance in a local election. In Nelson Mandela Bay, the DA led comfortably with 44.17 percent against the ANC's 25.48 percent. The ANC narrowly held on in Mangaung, home to Bloemfontein, edging the DA 33.91 percent to 33.49 percent, and remained the largest party in Buffalo City with 41.93 percent, well ahead of the United Democratic Movement on 18.39 percent and the DA on 16.85 percent.

A weakened governing party

The ANC has led every national and local administration in South Africa since the end of apartheid, but its support has eroded steadily since 2016. After losing its outright national majority in the 2024 general election for the first time, the party entered a national unity government with the DA and smaller parties; Sunday's local results suggest that erosion has continued at the municipal level, where service delivery failures, water and electricity outages and corruption scandals have featured heavily in campaigning in recent years.

The vote itself was not without legal turbulence. In October, the Constitutional Court ordered the electoral commission to reinstate 181 ANC councillor candidates across six municipalities after the party missed a filing deadline, a ruling the commission said it would implement despite the tight timeline before polling day; it later extended similar relief to 32 candidates from other parties who had missed the same deadline.

"It is about bringing together many different instruments, talents, voices and temperaments," IEC chairperson Mosotho Moepya said of the election, likening the process to assembling an orchestra.

Reaction and what comes next

Opposition figures pointed to the scale of the ANC's losses as evidence that voters were punishing the party over governance failures in municipalities it has long controlled. In Buffalo City, where the ANC remained the largest party but lost its outright majority, United Democratic Movement mayoral candidate Nqabayomzi Kwankwa said the results showed residents wanted change, suggesting his party would look beyond the ANC for coalition partners, according to reporting by The Citizen. Analysts cited by the Mail & Guardian said coalition governments, rather than single-party rule, are now likely to define local governance in South Africa for the next five years, with far more councils hung than after the 2021 vote.

Under South African law, newly elected councils must hold their first sittings within days of results being declared, compressing the window for parties to strike deals over mayoral and speaker positions. Negotiations are expected to be most intense in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, where the ANC, DA and ActionSA each hold enough seats to be a deciding factor, and in eThekwini, where opposition parties have previously combined to keep uMkhonto weSizwe out of power despite its strength at the ballot box. The commission said results remain subject to any outstanding objections, but described the count as complete after three days of tabulation following the November 4 vote.