For years, residents across South Africa’s towns and cities have lived with taps that run dry, power cuts that stretch on, roads that crumble and streetlights that stay dark. Rubbish goes uncollected. Those daily frustrations, piled up over more than a decade, found their outlet this week at the ballot box, and on Sunday the country’s governing party was handed the verdict.
The African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela that led South Africa out of apartheid and delivered freedom in 1994, received just 31% of the vote in Wednesday’s local government elections, according to official results announced Sunday. It is the worst election result in the party’s history, a steep drop of 15 percentage points from the last local elections in 2021, when it fell to 45% and for the first time dropped below 50% in any election. Roughly one-third of the support the ANC held five years ago is gone.
Party leaders did not pretend otherwise. “If anyone has not heard what the people are saying in this election, then you are lost,” said ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula, who described the outcome as “very catastrophic” for the ANC. He said the results demanded that the party “be humble, to hear our people and respect them,” and to “earn again through service and not through slogans the trust people have lent to others.”
The rebuke was sharpest in the country’s biggest cities, the very places where failed services have come under the most scrutiny. The ANC lost its place as the largest party to the Democratic Alliance in Johannesburg, the economic hub; in Pretoria, the capital; and in the large Ekurhuleni municipality east of Johannesburg. The DA also held onto Cape Town, the second-biggest city, which it already governed.
For the DA, the result marks a milestone in its long pursuit of becoming South Africa’s biggest party. Leader Geordin Hill-Lewis noted that his party had been around 20 percentage points behind the ANC in the 2024 national election, and said it had now “taken a big step forward” toward that goal. In Johannesburg, the DA put forward its former leader, 75-year-old Helen Zille, as its candidate for mayor. Her campaign leaned on attention-grabbing gestures, including snorkeling in a water-filled trench in the middle of a city road to highlight the state of public services.
The vote itself was enormous in scale. More than 500 parties contested, many of them picking up small shares, and hundreds of parties took part in an election to choose the local councilors who run South Africa’s eight biggest cities as well as its 44 district and 205 local municipalities. The DA won 25% of the vote nationwide. Another seven major parties shared around 30%, and the MK Party, led by former President Jacob Zuma after he broke away from the ANC and was expelled by it, took the third-largest share at around 10%.
That fragmentation is the one comfort the ANC can take from the wreckage. Even as its popularity has fallen sharply, no single party has overtaken it. The ANC remains the largest party by total share, and the once-unthinkable idea that it might one day cease to be South Africa’s biggest party, however much closer it has come, has not yet arrived.
The decline itself has been long in the making. Beyond the service failures, long-held anger over corruption scandals connected to the ANC was among the key issues in this election. In 2024, the party lost its Parliamentary majority for the first time in a national election, forcing a coalition national government and ending 30 years of dominance in what was widely seen as a seismic shift in South African politics. Monday’s local results extend that trajectory.
What happens next in the cities is far from settled. Because no party won a majority in almost all of the biggest municipalities, nearly all of them were left with hung councils. A series of complex coalition agreements will now be required to decide who governs, and, in a final irony of the vote, the ANC could yet find itself part of the governing coalitions in the very cities where voters just punished it most.