The ANC has won outright control of only 15 of the country’s 213 councils so far, as rivals eat into its support
The ANC is bleeding support across the country and heading for its worst election result since 1994, with the DA just six points behind and hung councils piling up as the count passes the halfway mark.
With 53% of the votes counted on Thursday night, IEC results showed the ANC clinging to 31.83% nationally.
The DA was within striking distance on 25.92%, while the MK Party was a distant third on 8.04% after crossing the one million vote mark.
The rest of the field was in single digits, with the EFF on 5.89%, ActionSA on 4.17%, the IFP on 4.04%, the FF Plus on 3.56%, the Patriotic Alliance (PA) on 2.89% and the SACP on 2.6%.
That is a dramatic shift from the 2021 local government elections, when the ANC won 45.59% of the vote and the DA 21.62%.
Projections by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) suggest the picture will hold, with the ANC expected to finish on 31.7%, the DA on 25.7% and the MK Party on 9%.
By the time of publication, the ANC had won outright control of 15 of the country’s 213 councils, the DA five and the MK Party two, with 57 councils already hung and 133 still to be calculated.
Political analyst Dr Oscar van Heerden agreed that the ANC was heading for its worst result since 1994, but said the party still had one last chance to recover in 2029.
“Let us hope there will be a phoenix from the ashes in 2029. It all depends on whether the current leadership will put the party first,” Van Heerden told IOL on Thursday night.
He said ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula and deputy president Paul Mashatile were not the leaders to turn the party around.
“Characters like Mbalula and Paul Mashatile won’t cut it,” he said.
Van Heerden said the ANC should accept the outcome, tell voters it had heard them and rebuild the party from the ground up, with some leaders resigning and an early conference being called.
“The young Turks must shed their fears and take over the party now and steer it in a different direction,” he said.
He said the ANC’s way back did not necessarily lie with the DA, but with the parties that had split from it.
“Black breakaway parties must be invited back into the fold, such as EFF and MK plus PA. Controversial, I know, but survival is uppermost in the minds of the ANC,” Van Heerden said.
“We have one more bite at the apple; let’s see if they will cock it up.”
Limpopo was the only province where the ANC still commanded more than half of the vote, on 54.28%.
In the Eastern Cape, long one of its strongholds, the party had slipped to 46.89%, while it polled 44.77% in North West, 42.19% in Mpumalanga, 41.39% in the Northern Cape and 39.62% in the Free State.
The Northern Cape delivered the ANC its biggest haul of councils so far, with six won outright.
It was in the big, urban provinces that the ANC took its heaviest beating, managing just 23.49% in KwaZulu-Natal, 20.12% in Gauteng and 13.82% in the Western Cape.
In Gauteng, the DA was sitting on 36.06%, and the ANC had yet to emerge as the biggest party in a single council in the province.
The metros, where coalition battles will be fiercest, are no kinder to the biggest party in the GNU.
The CSIR’s projections on Thursday afternoon had the DA finishing first in five of the eight metros, though it was only expected to win more than half of the vote in Cape Town.
The DA was projected on 55.90% in Cape Town, 40.97% in Nelson Mandela Bay, 33.94% in Johannesburg, 31.77% in Tshwane and 29.48% in Ekurhuleni.
The ANC was expected to top the vote in Buffalo City on 40.02% and Mangaung on 36.73%, but to fall short of a majority in both.
In Tshwane, the ANC was projected to be pushed into third place, behind ActionSA on 22.70%.
The DA tightened its grip on its Western Cape stronghold, where it was on 54.01% and had won four councils outright.
In KwaZulu-Natal, the MK Party was flexing its muscle in its first local government elections, sitting on 33.98% across the province.
It had won Richmond outright with 56.27% and iMpendle with 42.61%, and was the biggest party in uMuziwabantu, Mpofana and eNdumeni.
In eThekwini, the province’s only metro and its biggest prize, the MK Party had 41.46% of the votes counted so far.
Beyond KwaZulu-Natal, the MK Party failed to make a dent, with 11.07% in Mpumalanga its best showing and less than 5% in every other province.
In the Eastern Cape, the ANC held on to Amahlathi with 64.67%, Ngqushwa with 69.17% and Great Kei with 48.33%.
The DA swept to victory in Kouga with 58.55% and was the biggest party in Dr Beyers Naudé on 40.12%, ahead of the ANC on 36.4%.
In Nelson Mandela Bay, the DA held a commanding lead on 40.68% against the ANC’s 27.37%, while in Buffalo City the ANC was ahead on 39.44%, with the DA trailing on 19.57%.
ANC national chairperson Gwede Mantashe shrugged off the pressure, saying voters were simply using the freedoms won through the liberation struggle.
“We have given them that freedom and we don’t regret it,” Mantashe said.
First deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane insisted the party was far from finished.
“The ANC is yet to be condemned. What you see now compared to 2024 is totally different,” she said.
The IFP signalled it would drive a hard bargain in coalition talks, with spokesperson Mkhuleko Hlengwa warning that the party would not join governments that could not last.
“We are not prepared to govern at all costs,” Hlengwa said.
Dr Morné Mostert, a strategic foresight adviser and commissioner on the National Planning Commission in the Presidency, said a wave of hung councils was likely as the political landscape grew more crowded.
“One sign of democratic health will be that the elections are declared free and fair, and that the results are accepted by all parties,” Mostert said.
Turnout was up on 2021, with the CSIR projecting about 52% of registered voters, compared with about 46% five years ago.
Louw Nel, senior political analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, said earlier on Thursday that the narrowing gap between the two parties was a turning point.
He warned that the ANC’s weak hand in the metros could have consequences beyond local government.
“The GNU could suffer if the ANC is frozen out of coalition negotiations in most metros,” he said.