a majority of 50 per cent plus one in a municipal council, the DA was able to forge a coalition with the ACDP, COPE, FF+, UDM and IFP, again with support from the EFF, to take charge of Johannesburg as well. On 22 August 2016, the DA’s mayoral candidate, Herman Mashaba, became the first post-1994 mayor of South Africa’s biggest and economically most important city who did not carry an ANC membership card.
A municipal revolution
When the dust settled, it emerged that the ANC had lost control of four of South Africa’s eight big metropolitan areas (or ‘metropolitan municipalities’) – Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg. It is hard to overstate the significance of its defeat in the latter two. The combined economy of Pretoria and Johannesburg is bigger than the economies of all but four African countries. Although the ANC retained power in three other metros (Buffalo City, eThekwini and Mangaung) and formed a governing coalition council in a fourth (Ekurhuleni), the party’s combined support in the eight metros had declined by more than 10 per cent since 2011.
Most significantly, four (Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni) of the eight metros are now governed by either majority or minority coalitions. The trend is clear: at the local level, the ANC’s support is rapidly declining and – based on electoral trends since 2006 – will continue to decline for the foreseeable future (see Figure 2). Conversely, the likelihood of metropolitan municipalities being run by coalitions is increasing. Nationwide, the ANC’s support across all municipalities fell by more than 8 per cent between 2011 and 2016 to 54.49 per cent.
Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.
The ANC’s losses in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg, as well as in a handful of rural municipalities, signalled a fundamental shift in the country’s municipal politics. Up to the 2016 elections, the ANC had controlled 82.10 per cent of South Africa’s R287 billion municipal operating budget (the budget used to pay salaries and other regular expenses). Now, its share of the budget had dropped by a staggering R116 billion to only 41.73 per cent.3 At the same time, the share of the municipal budget controlled by municipalities where the DA was in outright control had increased from 14.95 per cent in 2011 to 15.63 per cent.4
So where did the rest of the money go? Crucially, after the 2016 elections, the share of municipal operating funds managed by councils run by coalition governments shot up from just 2.63 per cent in 2011 to a massive 41.31 per cent.5 In other words, municipalities governed by coalitions – whether formal, such as the DA-led multiparty coalition in Nelson Mandela Bay, or the minority coalitions supported by the EFF in Johannesburg and Tshwane – now control about R118 billion in municipal public funds.
The amount of money controlled by non-ANC municipal councils now roughly equals the combined budgets of all ANC-led municipalities. To underscore the ANC’s fall from municipal grace: following the 2016 elections, 58.27 per cent of South Africa’s local government budget is not controlled by the party.
Accelerating decline
A gradual trend away from one-party dominance is also visible at the provincial and national levels. At the provincial level, the ANC seems set to lose power in at least the Western Cape and Gauteng, which together account for half of South Africa’s total economic output (and provincial budgets). After the 2019 elections, the share of provincial government budgets controlled by non-ANC coalitions will probably be at least as great as the share controlled by the ANC.
The national trend is equally pronounced. While the ANC’s support seems to have remained remarkably stable between 1994 and 2014, hovering between a high of 69.60 per cent and a low of 62.15 per cent, we need to note that the most recent national data come from 2014. There is ample evidence that the party’s support has declined significantly since then, as the Zuma administration has lurched from one scandal to another. Although it can be misleading to draw firm conclusions from comparing different types of elections, it is still useful to include, alongside the national results, a national rollup from municipal elections.6 Figure 3 reflects the results of a statistical model in which national and provincial electoral trends from 1994 to 2016 are projected up to 2021. It shows that support for the ANC could drop below 50 per cent as early as 2019.
Source: Electoral Commission of South Africa.
Another indication that the ANC is in trouble at the national level comes from public opinion polls, which have consistently shown growing dissatisfaction with the ANC-led national government since 2009. In a poll conducted in March 2017, Ipsos found that 53 per cent of South African adults felt the country was moving in the ‘wrong’ direction (another 16 per cent were undecided, while only 31 per cent were satisfied). Significantly, there was almost no difference between the number of dissatisfied people who received social grants (51 per cent) and those who did not (53 per cent).7
The polls show that dissatisfaction cuts across economic divides, bolstering the notion that the ANC is facing an electoral revolt. The most authoritative proof comes from Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network that publishes public opinion polls on a wide range of topics related to democratic governance. In its most recent poll, Afrobarometer found that South Africans’ overall trust in the ANC had plummeted from 61 per cent in 2011 to 43 per cent in late 2015 – a massive 18 per cent.8 Another Ipsos poll conducted in May 2017 found that 65 per cent of South Africans (and 54 per cent of ANC supporters) wanted Zuma to resign as president. At 2.8 out of 10, Zuma’s presidential approval rating was the lowest recorded since polling began in 1993.9
Nonetheless, disapproval of the Zuma administration may not automatically translate into abstentions, or votes against the ANC. But this is where the 2016 municipal results become even more significant, as they provide the first solid evidence that ANC voters are changing their voting behaviour in order to register their dissatisfaction with the party. Before 3 August 2016, no one could definitively say that a significant number of ANC supporters would ever abstain en masse, or vote for someone else. But they did, and now we can. While trends can be misleading, and it can be risky to project municipal election results onto the provincial and national level, it seems at least clear that the ANC’s national support will not increase in 2019. This means it is almost certain to decline – the only question is by how much.
An interesting hint appears when we compare municipal results with national ones. Between 1994 and 2009, the ANC’s results at different electoral levels moved in a narrow band – its national results were about 8 per cent to 10 per cent better than its results in the preceding municipal elections. For example, while the party received 59.92 per cent of all votes in the 2000 municipal elections, this increased to 69.69 per cent in the 2004 national poll. But this pattern ended abruptly in 2009 when Zuma became president, as the ANC barely improved on its total in the preceding municipal elections. What’s more, in the 2014 national and provincial elections, the ANC vote actually declined by 0.78 per cent compared to its vote in the 2011 municipal elections – a telling reverse of the trend during its first 15 years in power.
This shows that the ANC will soon be in big trouble. In the 2016 municipal elections, the ANC vote dropped to an all-time low of 54.49 per cent.10 If the recent trend – with the ANC failing to increase its vote in national elections relative to municipal elections – persists, its share of the vote in the 2019 national and provincial elections will be smaller, and could even drop to below 50 per cent of the total.
This likelihood grows when one digs a little deeper into the national and provincial results. Even if the ANC ‘only’ loses the Western Cape (26.83 per cent in 2016) and Gauteng (46.38 per cent in 2016), this may already be enough to push its national support below 50 per cent. This is because more than one of every three South African voters lives in one of these two provinces.
If the ANC is hammered in the Western Cape and Gauteng, and its support drops only marginally in the rest of the country, it will be out of power by 2019.
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