ANC Support Hits 34 Percent; Millions of Voters Abandon Party Once Seen as Inevitable

Thirty-four per cent. That is where the ANC stands nationally, according to the latest Social Research Foundation polling, a number that would have been unthinkable a decade ago and that now describes the daily political reality for millions of South Africans who once voted for the movement without hesitation. The DA sits at 27%, the MK Party at 15%, the EFF at 7%. In Johannesburg the ANC has collapsed to 18%. In eThekwini it falls below 20% and trails both the MK Party and the DA. Only in Tshwane, where it records 32%, does it remain within striking distance of its principal competitor.

These are not abstract percentages. They represent residents in Johannesburg’s townships and eThekwini’s flatlands who have stopped believing the party that governed their lives since 1994 can still deliver. The water interruptions, the unsafe streets, the billing failures, the unemployment that has become a permanent feature of the landscape: voters experience the ANC not through its conference resolutions but through what happens, or fails to happen, in their streets and homes.

The figures do not represent a sudden rupture. They confirm a trajectory the ANC has repeatedly diagnosed and consistently failed to arrest. At the 2024 national election the party received 40.18% and lost the parliamentary majority it had held since 1994. The present 34% reading is a further deterioration from an already historic defeat.

The distinction between cause and accelerator matters here. Phala Phala and the daily revelations before the Madlanga commission are accelerators. They compound public suspicion that ethical renewal was a slogan rather than a governing ethic. They weaken the contrast that President Cyril Ramaphosa once represented between reform and the corruption of the preceding era. But neither episode, on its own, explains the depth of the retreat.

Analysts have long argued that renewal and mere leadership change are not the same thing. A movement does not renew itself simply by shedding one leadership slate for another while retaining the same organisational incentives, deployment practices and governing habits. Renewal requires institutional transformation: who is recruited, how leaders are selected, what conduct is sanctioned, whether branches deliberate on policy, and whether deployed representatives are held to measurable standards. The ANC has not undertaken this work.

The metropolitan collapse is the decisive battlefield. Johannesburg at 18% and eThekwini below 20% point to the potential unravelling of the ANC as an urban governing proposition. This did not begin with the current scandals. The ANC lost control of major cities in 2016. By 2021 Johannesburg had already become a fragmented political market, with the ANC at 33.6% and voters dispersing among several alternatives. The present poll suggests the urban retreat is acquiring a different quality: the party is no longer merely losing majorities but risks becoming structurally secondary in cities central to economic life and national political power.

Migration has become politically combustible in these urban spaces. Public anxiety about undocumented migration, competition for work and pressure on municipal services is real. So too is the danger of vigilantism and xenophobic mobilisation. The ANC is trapped between voters who believe the state has lost control and constitutional obligations that prohibit collective punishment. Its answer cannot be denial, moral lecturing or opportunistic imitation of anti-migrant parties. It must demonstrate lawful border administration, credible documentation systems, enforcement against exploitative employers and improved local services. Xenophobia flourishes where the state is absent and scarcity is politically weaponised.

The polling’s verdict on the president is politically devastating. Forty-four per cent of likely voters believe the president is guilty of a crime, against 12% who believe he is innocent. Among black voters the split is 47% to 15%. Even among ANC voters it is 37% to 29%. Around four in five respondents say he should be removed if found guilty. These are perceptions, not judicial findings, and constitutional due process must remain non-negotiable. But elections are decided by political judgment, not only legal verdicts.

The more serious damage is to the ANC’s brand architecture. Ramaphosa was not marketed simply as another leader. He was presented as proof that the ANC could correct itself. If the public no longer accepts that distinction, Phala Phala creates an equivalence, fairly or otherwise, between the moral claims of successive ANC administrations. The Madlanga revelations widen the injury by shifting attention from one disputed episode to the condition of the state itself: political interference, criminal networks, compromised institutions and an executive apparently unable to impose ethical coherence. The proximity of the criminal underworld to senior ANC leaders remains the most damaging element of all.

The ANC’s danger is therefore not simply that voters may disbelieve one president. It is that they may conclude the organisation is incapable of producing a qualitatively different governing class. A legalistic defence may protect office. It cannot on its own repair political authority.

Meanwhile, Patrice Motsepe’s 37% lead over Fikile Mbalula’s 17% in ANC succession preferences must be interpreted cautiously. Public polling does not elect an ANC president; branches and conference delegates do. Motsepe has also publicly disavowed political ambition. Even so, the persistence of his lead reveals what voters believe the existing field lacks: competence, economic credibility, distance from factional warfare and the ability to restore confidence beyond the ANC’s traditional base. The temptation will be to treat Motsepe as a personality-based rescue. That would repeat the error of investing organisational renewal in the perceived virtues of one leader, an approach that appears not to have worked with Ramaphosa.

The ANC’s decline should not be mistaken for the rise of a replacement dominant party. The DA is broadly stable nationally and stronger in the Gauteng metros, but it has not yet converted administrative claims into a compelling cross-class national majority. The MK Party is the principal beneficiary of ANC losses, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, but its appeal is concentrated and heavily personalised. The EFF remains flat despite the vacuum. The result is not alternation between two governing blocs but deeper fragmentation.

Coalition government is not a temporary inconvenience waiting to be outgrown. It is becoming the operating system of South African democracy. Yet the parties continue to approach coalitions as extensions of factional bargaining. If November produces hung councils across the major metros, another cycle of unstable mayors, opaque agreements and administrative disruption will further damage trust in democratic government among the very residents who depend on it most. South Africa needs enforceable coalition rules, transparent agreements, professional appointments, budget continuity and mechanisms for resolving disputes without collapsing councils.

Five propositions should frame the debate that follows. The ANC’s decline is structural; scandals accelerate it but do not originate it. The crisis of trust is inseparable from the crisis of state capability, because voters experience the party through water interruptions, unsafe streets, unemployment, billing failures and deteriorating infrastructure. Urban decline is now the central electoral battlefield and cannot be reversed by rural majorities or liberation memory alone. No opposition party has yet established a national hegemony, making coalition governance unavoidable. Succession without institutional renewal will merely redistribute responsibility for decline.

The ANC cannot communicate its way out of a performance crisis, litigate its way out of a legitimacy crisis or campaign its way out of an organisational crisis. Nor can the country afford parties that celebrate the ANC’s retreat while remaining unprepared to govern fragmented institutions.

The ANC still has agency. It can choose transparent accountability over reflexive protection, capable appointments over factional deployment, economic reform over ideological immobility, functioning municipalities over slogans. But the available time is narrowing. At 34%, decline is no longer a future tense. It is the environment in which the movement now operates, and the question the electorate is quietly asking is whether the ANC has finally understood the difference between losing support and losing its historical purpose.