KemetLeadsANC falls to 32% in South Africa's local elections — the voters came out to leave it
ANC falls to 32% in South Africa's local elections — the voters came out to leave it
South Africa voted on 4 November in its seventh local government election, with 29.2 million registered voters, 546 parties and nearly 137,000 candidates for 257 councils (SAnews, 2 November). With 87% of the 23,696 voting districts counted by mid-afternoon on 6 November, the ANC had 31.9% of the proportional vote, the DA 24.2%, Jacob Zuma's MK 9.4% and the EFF 6.3%, on a turnout of 51.3% against 45.9% in 2021, when the ANC took 45.6%; the DA led in six of the eight metros, MK in eThekwini and the ANC in Buffalo City alone, and the IEC declares the result on Sunday 8 November (The Outlier, from IEC data).
The reflex reading is a ruling party collapsing; the data says something harder. Turnout rose five points and the ANC's vote fell fourteen — the 2021 stay-at-homes came back and voted for someone else, which is also how Oxford Economics' Louw Nel reads it: ANC voters “did not stay away – as many expected – but rather showed up and voted for alternative parties” (Reuters, 5 November). That is the shape our Scorecard has given Cyril Ramaphosa's South Africa since 2018: conduct 4.2 out of 5, democratic trajectory at the 72nd percentile of African countries — the electoral democracy score held flat from 2018 to 2025 while the median African country's fell — and development delivery at the 10th, with GDP per head down 4% to 2022 while the median rose 1%, and life expectancy up 0.4 years against 1.8. A country at P72 on democracy and P10 on delivery is precisely one where the ruling party loses: the institutions are strong enough to count it out, and the services weak enough that voters want to. We wrote on 28 July that 2026's ballot year is a referendum on how leaders leave, and on 13 September that Ramaphosa's test before 4 November was whether voters would hear of a prosecuted ringleader rather than a scapegoat; what they heard instead, two days before the vote, was Ramaphosa conceding that municipal failures had eroded trust in democratic governance (SAnews, 2 November) — an honest diagnosis the ballot then countersigned. The ANC's chairperson Gwede Mantashe answered the count with “major areas, townships, and other areas have not been counted yet” (Reuters); at 87% the IEC's own tally will say by Sunday whether that is a forecast or a hope. The real test is not the declaration but the fourteen days after it: seven of eight metros with no party near a majority, Johannesburg on its sixth mayor in four years, and a party at 32% deciding whether it governs cities as a junior partner or leaves them to the coalition arithmetic it used to set.
The IEC's declaration on Sunday 8 November, then the fourteen days councils have to elect mayors and speakers — whether Johannesburg, Tshwane and eThekwini each seat a mayor by 22 November, and with which partners.
SourcesElectoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), 2026 Local Government Elections results dashboard · SAnews (government news agency), President urges voters to turn out for Local Government Elections, 2 Nov · The Outlier, local elections 2026 results from IEC data (87% of voting districts, 15:14 SAST), 6 Nov · Reuters (via CNBC Africa), ANC narrowly leads DA in early results — Nel, Zille and Mantashe quotes, 5 Nov · Al Jazeera, South Africa's ANC on track for new lows in local polls, 5 Nov
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