JOHANNESBURG — South Africans began voting Wednesday in local elections that are an evaluation of the once-mighty African National Congress party, which led the country out of white minority rule but has seen a consistent decline in support over the last decade.
The elections will decide who leads South Africa’s eight main city municipalities as well as its 44 district and 205 local councils.
A key battleground is the largest city and economic hub of Johannesburg. It’s often been called Africa’s richest city, but its problems with water, electricity supplies and other public services have underlined the frustrations of millions of South Africans with local government failures.
Johannesburg has changed its mayor five times in four years since the last local elections. It is currently governed by a fragile ANC-led coalition but is a target for South Africa’s second biggest party, the Democratic Alliance.
The DA has put forward its former national leader, 75-year-old Helen Zille, for mayor.
She has embarked on a series of publicity stunts meant to highlight the failures of the ANC and other parties to properly run Johannesburg, including snorkeling in a water-filled trench in the middle of a road and rowing an inflatable boat through a pond created by a water leak in another part of the city of around 5 million people.
Voters do not directly elect mayors but choose members of the councils that run cities and chose the mayors. Small parties often play kingmaker roles in local government coalitions.
In the last local elections in 2021, the ANC won less than 50% of the vote for the first time since the apartheid system of white minority rule ended in 1994.
The ANC then lost its 30-year parliamentary majority in national elections in 2024 — a seismic shift for Africa’s biggest economy — and entered into a national coalition with the DA and other parties, though ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa was reelected president of South Africa.
But while the parties are partners in a national unity government, they are fierce rivals in the local elections. Zille’s quest to be mayor of Johannesburg will test if the DA can win ground away from its traditional support in the second biggest city of Cape Town.
These elections will also be the first local vote contested by the MK Party that is led by former South African President Jacob Zuma. Zuma resigned as president because of corruption allegations in 2018 and was expelled from the ANC in 2024 for starting his new party.
It made a surprisingly strong debut in the 2024 national elections to become the third biggest party in Parliament and has strong support in Zuma’s home province of KwaZulu-Natal in the east of the country.
Inadequate public services — and especially failed water supplies — is a key election issue across the country. Others are South Africa’s high rates of crime and unemployment, while there has also been a national reckoning over immigration.
Groups protesting against illegal immigration have drawn support and attention across the country of 62 million people in recent months and have criticized Ramaphosa and his government. Some parties have made opposition to undocumented migration a central part of their local election campaigns.
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