Early Election Results Show South African Voters Abandoning the Socialist ANC

South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) party, which has held nearly unchallenged power since the end of apartheid in 1994, is on track for a historic loss of support in this week’s election. Voting was held on Wednesday, November 4, and the counting of the ballots was still underway as of Friday evening. “We are conscious of the message that our voters, especially our historical voters, are conveying to us, and we are going to have a serious, honest and deep reflection about how to rebuild the confidence between ourselves and the people of South Africa,” ANC spokesperson Mahlengi Bhengu said as the votes were being counted on Friday. The final results are not expected until Sunday, but at press time, election results indicate the ANC will end up with an all-time low of about 30 percent of the vote. At its peak in the early 2000s, the party commanded almost 70 percent support. “This is the most severe result that the ANC would have feared. It’s the ANC’s worst result in history,” said political analyst Daniel Silke. “It will undermine its ability to exert authority across South Africa, not just at a local level, but frankly at a national level as well.” Another analyst, Sandile Mnguni, said the biggest change heralded by this year’s election is that ANC supporters “are no longer voting out of loyalty.” “They are watching what their elected leaders are doing when in office,” he said, advising ANC politicians that they can no longer expect to win out of sheer political and cultural inertia as the party of Nelson Mandela. ANC remains the most powerful party in South Africa, but the dismal November 2026 local elections could set the stage for that era coming to a close during the next national election in 2029. The more centrist Democratic Alliance (DA) is nipping at the ANC’s heels with 24 percent today, and DA has improved its vote share since 2020 at the same rate ANC has been bleeding support. If that trend continues, the trend lines will cross in 2029. The third-place party is uMkhonto weSizwe (MKP), which was founded by former president Jacob Zuma after he separated from the ANC. MKP only has about nine percent support nationwide, but that was good enough to tip the scales to the DA in some races, and MKP could end up running a few important cities, including the port of Durban. As of Friday afternoon, the DA was leading in Johannesburg, but not by enough to win control of that vital city outright. A coalition government led by the DA seems likely, but party ladder Geordin Hill-Lewis said it would be “premature” to say who the coalition partners might be. In two of South Africa’s most heavily populated provinces, Gauteng (where Johannesburg is located) and KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC is poised to lose its crown as the largest member of multi-party alliances. “We take note of the voters deciding to vote against us in some of the municipalities in KZN. We think there is a message there we need to take to heart but we also see it as a maturing of democracy that people know if we have not performed, they can vote for a different party,” ANC spokesperson Sifiso Sonjica said Friday, effectively throwing in the towel after the ANC lost its majority position in all but one municipal council. Most of the public’s disenchantment with the ANC boils down to mismanagement, as the cities it controls are marked by failing infrastructure, piles of garbage, stinking pits of raw sewage, high levels of crime and corruption, soaring unemployment, and bankrupt treasuries. The MK party has little practical experience with governing, and not much enthusiasm for working with coalitions, so the DA is best positioned to benefit from the ANC’s deteriorating fortunes. The leader of the DA, 75-year-old Helen Zille, campaigned in Johannesburg by using a zipline to fly over a sinkhole the ANC left untouched for over four years, and later went snorkeling in a gigantic pothole. Zille is white and has denounced racial preferences in post-apartheid South Africa, but she has developed an enthusiastic following among black South Africans, thanks in part to her high-energy campaign style – and because the ANC has left so many cities in ruins. “Lots of people don’t like me,” she told the left-wing New York Times on Wednesday. “It’s fine. You don’t even have to like the D.A. You just have to love Johannesburg to consolidate your vote behind us.” As an example of analyst Sandile Mguni’s point about the ANC no longer being able to coast on its history, the ANC rarely bothered to announce the names of its mayoral candidates until this year, simply assuming that people would vote for the party itself. Zille’s rising popularity panicked the ANC into announcing the three finalists for its mayoral candidacy in Johannesburg – and then the party promptly forgot to submit the paperwork for one of them to election officials, so he had to bow out of the race.