Johannesburg’s Zille-Mashaba battle to the finish: John Matisonn

Key topics:Johannesburg mayoral race 2026 pits Zille, Mashaba, ANC candidate.Stable two-party coalition seen as key for city recovery and growth.Mashaba’s populism vs Zille’s experience shapes high-stakes contest..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 at 5:30am 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..By John Matisonn.The contest for Johannesburg’s mayoral chain is shaping up as the defining political battle of 2026, between the DA’s Helen Zille, ActionSA, whose candidate will almost certainly be Herman Mashaba, and an ANC candidate as yet unnamed.Already the signs are that it will be a brutal campaign, but when it’s over, Johannesburg needs two out of those three parties to join together in a strong two-party coalition, to provide the stability to really turn the city around. If it does, the benefits will extend to property values well beyond Johannesburg, as well as the JSE, the national growth rate and the national employment numbers. Since South Africa’s growth rate – much trumpeted this year – remains at or below population growth and below most African countries, fixing Johannesburg could be the real game-changer. .Read more:.Full speech: Helen Zille accepts DA's nomination as Joburg Mayoral candidate.The present budding mood of cautious confidence will swell. And it will set the stage for the national elections two years’ later, in 2029. For Zille, a priority is to convince Johannesburg voters that a vote for one of the small parties is not only bad for the stability of the next city council, but also costs the DA the high number it needs from everyone’s second vote – for the proportional representative councillors.She argues that the size of the small parties ensures that they cannot offer solid governmental service, and inevitably become prone to blandishments from the highest bidder for a short-term seat on the executive with its access to juicy city tenders.Right now, Cape Town based commentators seem more optimistic than Jo’burgers. Capetonians are reminded daily of the evident growth in the city and across the winelands through Durbanville, Paarl, Franschhoek, Somerset West and Stellenbosch, with its concomitant traffic congestion and extensive new roadworks. Between Franschhoek and Paarl alone, three substantial-sized brand new shopping malls have recently opened. We complain about the time taken on the massive roadworks along all three arteries, but we are even more glad that they are being built every day, and we see steady improvements as each section is reopened at last. Meanwhile, many in Johannesburg remain cynical, assuming the current Gauteng ANC leadership cannot be decisively dislodged from Johannesburg, or that even if it is the problems are too far gone to fix.Zille has to persuade them that she can do both.Right now the most likely scenario is that Zille comes in first, but well short of 50%, leading to a quest for a single, stable partner to provide the best chance of a consistent, planned recovery.If she wins the most votes, the most stable partnership would be with a single relatively large partner which likely will be the African National Congress or Action South Africa.Zille has said that her coalition partner will be whichever is the “least bad” option. Both are fraught with risks and prior clashes with Zille, but parties often ignore past conflict if it gets them a piece of the power structure.Zille worked closely with Mashaba when he came into the DA as its Johannesburg mayoral candidate, but he resigned from the party in acrimony in 2019 following a conflict with leadership. As a DA candidate he embraced its liberal policies, but as leader of his own party his comments have become more racially charged. He has concluded that’s the way to get the black vote that eluded the DA.Though Zille has been quick to point out both the difficulties of winning and the time it will take to fix Johannesburg, Mashaba has typically been more boastful.Going up against Zille will be “easy”, Mashaba told Radio 702 recently. “She underestimates me,” he said. “When she looks at me, she doesn’t see a 66-year-old man; she sees a boy, which is an advantage for me. When she engages with me, she engages on the basis of superiority.” He sees that as his strategic advantage. Mashaba saw his party’s poor showing in 2024, coming in behind both the Patriotic Alliance and the Freedom Front plus as the eighth biggest party with only 1.2% of the vote and six MPs, as a lesson that he must refocus back to local elections, with his Johannesburg roots as the priority.But Mashaba’s lack of political skills has saddled him with a reputation for flip flopping. He came to office in 2016 hated by the EFF, which said he “disdains the poor” and “hates his blackness”. Persuading the DA to dump him was their price of collaboration. By the end of his term they were calling him the “EFF mayor.”DA councillors were suspicious that he had allowed the EFF to profit from his term of office in return for their votes. When he resigned, he thanked the EFF “for the dedication to the work of delivering the dignity of change to our residents.”The authors of the book Malema, money, power, patronage, concluded that his extravagant claims to have stopped billions of rands in corruption were “massively inflated”, suggesting “creative accounting.” A DA report concluded that under Mashaba the DA had been “unable to prosecute a proper DA agenda because we are overly beholden to the EFF.”Mashaba fought the national elections promising not to work with the ANC, but changed his mind, backing the ANC when it raised the VAT after the DA refused, and also working with them in Gauteng municipal councils. “ActionSA was run circles round by the ANC, as it desperately tried to manufacture a middle ground that simply did not exist,” wrote political commentator and pollster Gareth van Onselen in his latest report. “And so ActionSA is seen as potentially gullible.”Van Onselen concluded that Mashaba was “more of a populist than a mayor. He has come to view South Africa, white South Africans in general (“descendants of a savage and brutal system”) and DA supporters in particular (“racists”) entirely through a racial lens. He believes Helen Zille yearns to “bring back apartheid”, and (white) critics of ActionSA’s performance in government, should leave the country. .Read more:.Helen Zille’s high-stakes gamble: Can the DA take Johannesburg? - Nicholas Lorimer.“He is not able to speak with any authority on any substantive policy matter, his positions reduced to rambling rhetoric and sound-bites that lack depth or understanding, nuance or insight.” Van Onselen concludes that the stakes are highest for ActionSA. “It is Johannesburg or bust. When 40% of all your national votes come from a single metro, you have to throw the kitchen sink at it. It puts you in a bind, reinforcing the very limitations you need to overcome.”

Johannesburg’s Zille-Mashaba battle to the finish: John Matisonn

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