Municipal Elections Will Decide Whether South Africa’s Coalition Survives
The local elections will test whether the GNU can hold, or begin to unravel from the ground up.
Written By: Thando Nzimande
South Africa’s Government of National Unity has spent its first eighteen months learning to argue without collapsing. Formed in the aftermath of the ANC’s fall to 40.2% support in the 2024 national election, the coalition brought the Democratic Alliance into government for the first time since 1994, alongside smaller partners deliberately chosen to exclude the EFF and MK.
It has survived a budget crisis, disputes over National Health Insurance, and running battles over expropriation policy. But the local government elections set for 4 November 2026 will test something the GNU has not yet faced: an actual contest for power between its own members, fought ward by ward, in front of the voters who will decide whether coalition politics can work below the level of Cabinet meetings and joint statements.
The clearest flashpoint is Johannesburg. DA stalwart Helen Zille has been announced as the party’s mayoral candidate for the city, while the Patriotic Alliance has put forward its deputy president, Kenny Kunene, meaning three parties that currently sit together in the GNU will be fighting for control of the country’s biggest metro. It is a peculiar arrangement: partners in Pretoria, rivals in Braamfontein.
A similar dynamic has already played out in the Western Cape, where the DA and PA, former local coalition partners, have clashed over control of George Municipality, with the PA defeating the DA twice in a string of tightly contested by-elections. If a party that campaigns hard against you in one province is a governing partner in the next, the question of what the coalition actually stands for becomes difficult to answer credibly on a doorstep.
This is not simply intra-GNU rivalry. It is also a story of internal ANC contradiction. In Gauteng, the ANC governs in a minority administration without the DA, even as the national party has signed a formal coalition agreement with the DA that deliberately excludes the EFF and MK. Premier Panyaza Lesufi has, in effect, been caught between a national leadership working with the DA and local structures more inclined to work with the EFF, an arrangement analysts have described as difficult to reconcile with better service delivery in the province. The local elections will force a decision that the party has so far avoided making explicitly: does it campaign as a GNU partner, or does it campaign as an ANC seeking to claw back the votes it lost to parties further to its left.
Political analysts are split on how much this fragmentation actually threatens the national coalition. One reading holds that regional government is simply a different beast from national politics, with different relationships and looser loyalty patterns, so friction at municipal level need not spill upward.
The opposing view, associated with analysts such as Ralph Mathekga, holds that regional ANC leaders may increasingly see the GNU itself as a threat to their local power base, which would make the local elections not a sideshow but a referendum on the national arrangement. What both camps agree on is that the aftermath matters more than the campaign: the coalitions that form after the vote, the number of hung councils, and the minority governments that result will determine how much instability the country absorbs going into 2027.
The numbers give both sides in the GNU reason for anxiety. Analysts are forecasting further ANC decline, with support potentially dipping toward 30% in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal, provinces that between them contain some of the country’s most contested metros. Compounding this is the ongoing Madlanga Commission, which is investigating allegations of criminal cartel involvement, interference, and corruption within the police and criminal justice system.
In January 2026, President Ramaphosa instructed police to establish a special task team to investigate fourteen police officers and Ekurhuleni municipal officials named in the commission’s interim report, precisely the kind of daily, televised corruption narrative that does the ANC’s brand no favours in the run-up to a vote. Meanwhile the DA arrives at this election in a genuinely new position: for the first time in a municipal poll, it is not the official opposition but a party of national government, which means voters can now hold it to account for delivery rather than simply for rhetoric.
There is a case, however, that the coalition will survive the noise. Both ANC and DA spokespeople have publicly emphasised the GNU’s institutional resilience, a maturing culture of negotiation, in the ANC’s framing, and a demonstration that political competition and cooperation can coexist, in the DA’s. Investor confidence has firmed since the coalition’s formation, South Africa exited the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list in 2025, and GDP growth ticked up to 1.1% in 2025 from 0.7% in 2023, with unemployment easing slightly to 31.9% by the third quarter of last year. Neither the ANC nor the DA has an obvious incentive to be blamed for the coalition’s collapse, particularly with an economy showing tentative signs of recovery.
But neither party has an incentive to lose seats to protect the other’s local standing either, and that tension between governing together and campaigning apart is the real story of this election cycle.
The GNU was built to answer a national arithmetic problem: no single party commanded a majority, so several had to share power. Local government does not obey that same arithmetic uniformly, some municipalities will produce clear majorities, others will replicate the national deadlock in miniature, and a handful, Johannesburg chief among them, will force GNU partners into direct, public combat for the same office.
What emerges from that combat, and how gracefully the winners and losers return to the Cabinet table afterward, will say more about whether South Africa’s experiment in coalition governance is durable than anything that has happened in Parliament since 2024. The local elections were always going to be a test. The open question, six months out, is whether they are a stress test the GNU passes, or the moment its founding compromise starts to unravel from the ground up.
Z. Thando Nzimande – is A Wits Alumni, a Future Voices scholar and researcher at MEARI, A Neuroscience researcher, economic and geopolitical commentator/analyst and his goal is to provide insightful, well-researched analysis on global affairs, informed by his scientific training, critical thinking skills, and leadership experience.