LOCAL ELECTIONS 2026: GNU has failed to change local coalition politics, report finds

South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU) has done little to change how political parties cooperate at the local government level, with the ANC and Democratic Alliance (DA) continuing to topple each other’s municipal governments despite governing together nationally.This is one of the key findings of the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra) 2026 Coalitions Barometer, released on Wednesday, 7 October, which warns that the country could face even more complicated coalition arrangements after the 4 November local government elections as voters continue to divide their support among an expanding number of parties.The report found that the ANC and DA have never formed part of the same municipal coalition, either before or after the formation of the GNU in June 2024.President Cyril Ramaphosa (right) shakes hands with then DA leader John Steenhuisen (left) after Ramaphosa accepted the nomination on 14 June 2024 to be President of South Africa. The DA’s Siviwe Gwarube looks on. (Photo: Phando Jikelo / Parliament of SA) Across 175 municipal administrations tracked by Mistra since the 2021 local government elections, the ANC was a member of 90 administrations and the DA of 52, but there was not a single administration in which both parties were coalition partners.The finding also comes as former Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) deputy chairperson and former acting chair Terry Tselane warned that South Africa could not expect stable coalitions at municipal level when the country’s own national coalition government lacked a clear common programme.Tselane, now executive chairman of the Institute of Election Management Services in Africa, said coalition politics was no longer an exception, but an inevitable feature of South Africa’s proportional representation system.His concern, he said, was that political parties were entering coalition arrangements without first agreeing on what they intended to achieve together.“There’s got to be a programme. You can’t have a coalition without a programme,” Tselane said.GNU’s local government blind spotMistra’s findings offer a striking picture of two different coalition cultures developing simultaneously.Nationally, the ANC and DA sit together in a 10-party GNU which, at the report’s February 2026 cut-off, controlled 287 of the National Assembly’s 400 seats, well above the 201 seats required for a majority.The arrangement is so large that eight of its 10 member parties could leave and the remaining parties would still retain a parliamentary majority.Mistra describes the GNU as an unusually oversized “grand coalition” with no comparable equivalent among the municipal coalitions it studied. At the local level, however, the two largest GNU partners have continued to compete for power.The report found 28 instances in which a municipal government containing either the ANC or DA was ended through a motion of no confidence and replaced by a government containing the other party.Although the rate of these ANC-DA substitutions declined after the GNU was formed, Mistra cautioned that this appeared to reflect a broader decline in motions of no confidence rather than a new relationship of cooperation between the two parties. “In other words,” the report suggests, national and local coalition politics have effectively been operating on “two separate tracks that only rarely interact with each other”.Tselane, however, said this disconnect pointed to a deeper problem.Institute of Election Management Services in Africa chairperson Terry Tselane. (Photo: Gallo Images / City Press / Leon Sadiki) He said the GNU had brought together parties that had shown sharply different positions on major questions such as immigration issues in South Africa as well as global matters including China, the United States and the Middle East, without establishing a sufficiently coherent programme for governing together.“You’ve got people who are in a relationship with the government of national unity all with different agendas and different purposes,” he said.Tselane argued that political parties could not simply enter a coalition carrying their individual election manifestos and expect to govern effectively.“Coalition means compromise,” he said.He pointed to Germany’s 2021 coalition negotiations, where the Greens, Social Democrats and Free Democrats spent months working through specialised groups before forming a government. They successfully negotiated what is known as the “traffic light coalition”. Tselane said the lesson for South Africa was that coalition partners should first agree on a programme of action and only then determine which party or individual had the capacity to implement different parts of it.“At the moment there is no coherence,” he said. “Everybody says whatever they want to say.”Coalition politics no longer an exceptionMistra’s research shows why this matters ahead of the local elections.Between the 2021 local government elections and February 2026, 80 of South Africa’s 213 directly elected municipal councils, equating to 37.6%, were hung at some point, meaning no single party held a majority.Those 80 municipalities went through 175 different administrations during the period studied. By February 2026, 74 municipalities were being governed through coalition or minority arrangements.Yet the picture is more complicated than a simple story of perpetual instability. Of the 70 administrations formed immediately after the 2021 elections, 23 were still in office in essentially their original form four years later. And in 38 of the 101 administrations that had ended by February 2026, the largest party had managed to rebuild its coalition around itself rather than losing power altogether.A true collapse, defined by Mistra as the largest governing party losing office, occurred in 46 of the 80 municipalities.Half of the governing administrations lasted less than 651 days, or roughly 21 months, although that figure includes coalition “rebuilds” in which the anchor party remained in power while changing its partners.Johannesburg and Karoo Hoogland were the most politically turbulent municipalities in the dataset, each going through six administrations.Key risk is excluding the biggest partyOne of the strongest findings in the report is also that coalitions which exclude the party with the most seats are particularly vulnerable. Mistra found that administrations that excluded the plurality party (the largest party in council) collapsed at about four times the rate of those that included it.Immediately after the 2021 elections, 26 of the 70 first administrations were anti-plurality coalition arrangements formed without the party that had won the most seats. By February 2026, only six of the 74 administrations still in office excluded the plurality party, while 60 were led by it.Mistra cautions that this does not mean the largest party has an automatic right to govern. A coalition that excludes the plurality party can still be legitimate if it commands a majority. But that suggests excluding the largest party creates structural difficulties because that party remains outside government with an incentive to bring it down.In fact, of 31 anti-plurality coalitions in the dataset that were replaced by another coalition, 29 were replaced by a coalition led by the very party that had initially been excluded. That finding could become particularly important after 4 November if fragmented election results produce councils where several smaller parties have to decide whether to work with or against the largest party.More fragmented councils — more complicated dealsMistra expects that possibility to become more common, with the report arguing that the ultimate driver of coalition politics is not political parties but voters, who have increasingly distributed their support among more parties.If that fragmentation continues in the 2026 local elections, the report warns, there will be more hung councils requiring more complicated arrangements to reach the governance threshold.This is where the Coalition Bill becomes important.The Local Government Municipal Structures Amendment Bill of 2026, commonly known as the Coalition Bill, was introduced in Parliament in August and is intended to create a legislative framework for coalition governments at municipal level. Parliament’s portfolio committee has begun processing the Bill. Among its central proposals is making written coalition agreements mandatory. The agreements would have to be submitted to municipal managers and provincial MECs responsible for local government and published in the Provincial Gazette. The Bill also proposes extending the period for establishing municipal governance structures from 14 to 30 days, while adding measures dealing with motions of no confidence, the removal and election of municipal office-bearers and a minimum electoral threshold for parties seeking representation in councils.Threshold reservationsBut Tselane has reservations about the proposed threshold.He argued that the proposal risked addressing the wrong problem by attempting to constrain smaller parties rather than forcing larger parties to take responsibility for coalition-building.He pointed to Johannesburg, where six parties collectively held about 94% of council seats, arguing that the fact that a party with a single seat could nevertheless secure the mayoralty was not fundamentally a problem created by the small party.“It’s not the problem of a minority party. It’s a problem with majority parties,” Tselane said.He argues that if larger parties collectively command overwhelming numbers of seats, they should be capable of forming a governing arrangement among themselves instead of blaming smaller parties for exploiting the gaps between them.Tselane also questioned whether the threshold was constitutionally sound, arguing that it could conflict with the constitutional right of citizens to stand for office and occupy office once elected.The proposed legislation is still being processed and has not yet become law. Parliament said in August that its portfolio committee was developing a programme for processing the Bill, while the government has said the legislation is intended to promote stable and accountable coalition governance. DM