South Africans vote in municipal elections as anger over services threatens fresh ANC losses
South Africans are voting in municipal elections on Wednesday, with anger over corruption, crime and failing public services threatening to inflict fresh losses on the ruling African National Congress.
South Africans queued from early on Wednesday to vote in municipal elections, with anger over corruption, crime and failing public services threatening to inflict fresh losses on the African National Congress, the party that has governed since the end of apartheid.
At the Lawley informal settlement south of Johannesburg, long queues formed outside polling stations around sunrise, Reuters reported, while voters in Khayelitsha in Cape Town were photographed waiting to cast their ballots. About 29 million people are registered to vote across more than 23,000 voting stations, which are open from 7am to 9pm, with 10,526 council seats contested across the country.
The election is the ANC’s latest test after a long slide. The party of Nelson Mandela fell below 50 per cent support for the first time in municipal elections in 2021, when it won 45.6 per cent, and dropped to 40.2 per cent in the 2024 national election. Opinion polls ahead of Wednesday’s vote suggested it could fall below 40 per cent this time, and some suggested it could win less than a third of the vote, a result that would mark a historic retreat for a movement that once commanded overwhelming majorities.
The grievances driving that slide are concrete and daily. Voters cite water outages, power cuts, crumbling infrastructure, crime and corruption, and the Guardian’s reporting on the election described deep discontent over exactly those failures. In many communities, the election is less a verdict on national ideology than on whether taps run, lights stay on and streets are safe.
Control of Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial hub and largest city, is the biggest prize. The centre-right Democratic Alliance, which already runs Cape Town and is heavily favoured to retain it, leads the polls in all three major Gauteng metropolitan areas — Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane around Pretoria — but has not been polling above 40 per cent in any of them. Its Johannesburg mayoral candidate, Helen Zille, is projected to win the most votes but fall short of a majority, pointing to another round of coalition bargaining.
That prospect of hung councils is now the norm rather than the exception in South African local government. With no party large enough to replace the ANC outright in most places, many cities are heading for unstable coalitions, in which smaller parties hold the balance of power. The Economic Freedom Fighters, whose leader Julius Malema cast his vote in Seshego, are among the parties whose support could decide who governs the metros.
The stakes extend beyond town halls. The outcome will help shape the political landscape ahead of the 2029 national election, and it could influence the succession battle within the ANC as President Cyril Ramaphosa approaches the end of his term as party leader in 2027. A bruising local result would weaken the hand of the party’s leadership; a better-than-feared result would buy it time, but neither outcome would by itself reverse the longer trend.
Polling day itself has so far been described as orderly, with voters queuing patiently in many areas. South Africa’s electoral commission has a week to announce the final results, although early indications are expected sooner, and results had been expected to be announced by Sunday. Because mayors are not directly elected, parties will then have two weeks from the announcement to form councils and elect mayors.
The ANC’s defenders argue that the party still finishes as the largest single political movement even in a poor result, and that coalition politics, rather than outright defeat, is the story of the election. Its critics argue that a party that once promised liberation and delivery now presides over failing services in the cities it still runs, and that Wednesday’s vote is the public’s latest chance to say so.
What happens next will be decided in the count and then in the council chambers. If the ANC’s vote falls as polls suggest, the party will face a difficult internal reckoning before 2027 and a harder road to 2029; if the Democratic Alliance and smaller parties cannot turn pluralities into stable coalitions, the cities that voters most want fixed could face another cycle of fragile government. Either way, the queues at sunrise on Wednesday showed a democracy still turning out to be heard.
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