Johannesburg skyline. Image: Khaanya96, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
South Africa's governing African National Congress has suffered the worst election result in its history, winning just 32.5% of the vote in municipal elections held on 4 November 2026. The party that led the country out of apartheid in 1994 has never before fallen so far at the ballot box, and the scale of the defeat has redrawn the map of South African politics.
Final results announced at the weekend confirmed a fall of 15 percentage points from the 47.5% the ANC won at the last local elections in 2021 — the steepest drop of any party on the ballot. Turnout rose to about 54.5%, with roughly 15.9 million of the country's 29.2 million registered voters casting a ballot, up from 46% in the pandemic-hit 2021 vote.
A Historic Fall for the Liberation Party
The ANC's decline has been steady but this result marks a sharp break. The party won nearly 70% of the national vote in 2004, fell below 50% for the first time at the 2021 municipal elections, and managed just over 40% at the 2024 national elections, when it was forced into a unity government with nine other parties. Now it has lost another large share of its support in a single vote.
Political analyst Daniel Silke told the AFP news agency that the outcome was "the most severe result that the ANC would have feared" and "the ANC's worst result in history". The result is widely read as a verdict on years of municipal mismanagement: voters punished the party for failing water supplies, persistent power cuts, high crime and crumbling public services in towns and cities across the country.
Who Gained as the ANC Lost Ground
Much of the ANC's lost support went to parties that did not contest the last local elections. Former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, contesting municipal polls for the first time, arrived in third place with 9.9% of the vote. The South African Communist Party, standing on its own rather than under the ANC banner, took 2.6%.
The pro-business, centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) gained about three points to reach 22.9% and finished second, while ActionSA almost tripled its share to 5.0%. The Economic Freedom Fighters went the other way, slipping from 10.5% to 6.4%.
No Outright Majority in Any Major City
The ANC failed to win an outright majority in any of South Africa's eight metropolitan municipalities, although it finished ahead in four of them, including Johannesburg, Mangaung and Buffalo City. The DA kept its majority in Cape Town and was leading in Nelson Mandela Bay and Tshwane, the municipality that includes the capital, Pretoria.
With so many councils left without a clear winner, weeks of coalition negotiations now lie ahead as parties bargain over who will run the country's biggest cities. Control of Johannesburg, the financial capital, is among the prizes at stake.
What Happens Next
The local ballot is seen as a key measure of voter sentiment ahead of the next general election in 2029, and the result will sharpen the debate inside the ANC about its future under President Cyril Ramaphosa. For now, the party that dominated South African politics for three decades must learn to govern through coalitions — in cities it once ran alone.
As Daily Maverick reported, the ANC's share fell 15 percentage points in five years, from 47.5% in 2021 to 32.5% — a slide that leaves South Africa's political landscape more fragmented than at any point since democracy began.
South Africa is not the only country where voters have recently refused to hand any party a clear mandate — New Zealand's election also ended without a clear winner, with no party securing a majority.
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