WSM's Jaundiced Eye: Reading the LGE tea leaves

South Africans vote in local government elections on Wednesday. The stakes reach well beyond municipal councils. William Saunderson-Meyer warns of a familiar trap: the ANC losing votes yet keeping power, as it did after 2021 and again in the GNU. The DA needs more than seats, he argues. It needs the whip hand, and the will to use it. Even many ANC supporters seem fed up. Will they act on it this time?.Jaundiced Eye by William Saunderson-Meyer.Wednesday’s local government elections (LGEs) matter as much nationally as they do at a municipal level. At stake is not simply which parties enter the coalitions that will inevitably follow, but which actually wield power within them — and whether they have enough of it to govern effectively. The results will determine far more than the fate of municipal councils and their ability to reverse abysmal levels of service delivery. Wednesday’s polls — like Tuesday’s midterms in the United States — are both a verdict and an indicator. These are the tea leaves from which we might read how much the ANC’s abject failure at local government really matters to the average voter. They also offer a foretaste of how the 2029 election might reshape the balance of national political power for years to come.But tea leaves aren't facts. Municipal elections are not national elections in miniature. Turnout is traditionally lower — just 46% in the 2021 LGEs against 59% in the 2024 national election — while local personalities and parochial grievances can produce electoral outcomes very different from national voting patterns. Wednesday's significance as a pointer to 2029 lies not so much in the precise distribution of votes, as in what the parties subsequently do with the power that those votes confer.The 2021 LGEs in important ways foreshadowed the Government of National Unity (GNU) that emerged three years later. The proliferation of hung councils — about a third of the 213 contested municipalities — produced an array of coalitions in which political appointments and the perks of office were bartered for support. Too often, the result was not a fundamental change in governance but a redistribution of the spoils. The GNU that followed the 2024 national elections replicated this pattern. Despite losing its parliamentary majority, the ANC retained the presidency, key ministries and — despite modest reforms aimed at improving economic efficiency — control of all the principal institutions shaping the ideological direction of government. The ANC’s primary coalition partner, the DA, gained ministerial office, as did an assortment of smaller parties. While including the minnows helped justify the GNU’s grand title, they were politically inconsequential. The ANC continued to hold the whip hand.The greatest danger on Wednesday is that the ANC will again manage to turn an electoral rout into a governing reprieve. Although the GNU has been more stable than the chaotic LGE coalitions of 2021, both arrangements produced much the same result: stagnation. An ANC, characterised by ideological rigidity, managerial ineptitude and a callous indifference to the plight of ordinary South Africans, has lost votes without relinquishing its grip on power.To prevent this from happening yet again, voters will have to hand sufficient power to a competent opposition that can realistically compel the ANC to reform. That, at least in the economically critical metros, means the DA. But with outright DA majorities unlikely outside Cape Town, according to the pre-election polls, the party needs to win enough seats to dictate the terms of whatever coalitions follow. This might mean a two-party arrangement with the ANC, with which it is running neck and neck in key metros, or an alliance with smaller parties that excludes the ANC.In other words, the DA needs to seize the whip hand. But that’s not enough. Given its often forelock-tugging deference to the ANC within the GNU under former leader John Steenhuisen, his successor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, will have to prove that the party knows how to wield it in any new power-sharing arrangement at municipal level, where the ANC may be desperately dependent on DA support. The problem, however, runs deeper than the shortcomings of individual leaders and their failure to leverage the power they have.South Africa's coalition experience has too often turned an electoral mechanism intended to broaden democratic representation into a cynical exercise in trading political support for the perks of office. In municipal coalitions, the largest party — most often the ANC — has exploited the naïveté, greed or stupidity of its smaller partners to preserve its grip on power, producing weak, inefficient administrations with little accountability to voters. The result has been not power-sharing in the interests of voters, but a scramble to divide the spoils.None of this is inevitable. Coalition government is the norm in proportional representation systems, and there is nothing inherently dysfunctional about it. It works well enough elsewhere, encouraging compromise on policy and greater responsiveness to shifts in voter opinion.What has been missing in South Africa, however, is a political culture in which agreement on how to govern takes precedence over negotiations about who gets which job. The crucial distinction is between a coalition built around a negotiated programme of government and one cobbled together merely to secure the numbers needed to occupy office.This demands a degree of political maturity that has so far been in short supply in South Africa. The 2026 LGEs are an opportunity to change this. While politicians are not, by nature, selfless creatures, they are capable of enlightened self-interest. When a government is failing spectacularly — as it plainly is doing in South Africa today — there are electoral rewards to be had from putting aside short-term personal gain and immediate partisan advantage.The contrasting records of the ANC and DA in local government illustrate this. The DA’s repeated electoral successes in Cape Town and the Western Cape have been the political reward for administrative competence and an intolerance of corruption. While hardly a party of saints, it has nevertheless demonstrated the political value of establishing a reputation for effective governance. By contrast, the ANC’s dismal record of infrastructural decay, poor service delivery and corruption is reflected in its declining electoral support at local, provincial and national levels.Fascinatingly, much of this disenchantment is shared by the ANC’s own supporters. Frustratingly, they don’t act on it. In Social Research Foundation/Common Sense (SRF/CS) polling late last year, 53% of ANC supporters identified their own party as the one most associated with broken promises, while 38% associated it with being ‘anti-poor’. Only 6% of ANC supporters applied that description to the DA. Other surveys reveal that among voters who intend to vote for the ANC, over 60% associate the party with high levels of corruption and patronage, and believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction.There is also, it seems, an appetite for political pragmatism that the parties have been unwilling or unable to satisfy. As noted last week, SRF/CS polling found 68% support for ANC–DA coalitions in municipalities where neither could govern alone. But the ANC's ideological affinities and historical ties with MK and the EFF, coupled with its fear that cooperation would strengthen the DA at its own expense, remain formidable obstacles.The enduring paradox of South African politics is that widespread disenchantment with the ANC has brought the DA only modest electoral gains. The ANC's losses have coincided with the rise of its breakaway rivals, the EFF and MK, growing voter abstention, and the proliferation of smaller parties. A key indicator of growing voter maturity will be whether, especially in the metros, voters consolidate their support behind parties with sufficient electoral weight to shape the coalitions that follow — or continue to scatter it like confetti among ineffectual minor parties. In other words, the most important measure of Wednesday’s election is not simply whether voters change WHO governs, but whether the result creates the conditions for changing HOW South Africa is governed..Read more:.WSM: ANC’s coalition maths: a partner it can’t stomach, or allies who’ll cost it more.That is why the LGEs matter beyond the fate of individual municipalities. Their results cannot be extrapolated mechanically to the 2029 national election. But just as the municipal upheavals of 2021 anticipated the coalition politics of 2024, the coalitions that emerge now could be the template for government after the 2029 national election..Follow WSM on X @TheJaundicedEye.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

WSM's Jaundiced Eye: Reading the LGE tea leaves

Related Stories

Latest SRF poll: DA leads Joburg and Tshwane, MK running away with eThekwini

WSM: ANC’s coalition maths: a partner it can’t stomach, or allies who’ll cost it more

Mailbox | The GNU: Two years, three tests

WSM's Jaundiced Eye: The political afterlife of JZ