South Africa votes under shadow of service failures

South Africans vote Wednesday in a closely watched local government election, with parties battling for control of major cities in a contest expected to offer a measure of the national mood before the next national polls. The vote comes as a weary electorate contends with crumbling infrastructure, dry taps, persistent inequality and unemployment above 30 percent, deepening public disillusionment with the political establishment.

Polling stations opened at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) and will close at 9:00 pm (1900 GMT). “I want things to change… people must get work. People mustn’t suffer,” said Thembinkosi Somana, 50, who was first in line to cast his ballot at a polling station in Langa, Cape Town’s oldest township. In Johannesburg, Andrea Smith, 41, who works in human resources, arrived at a polling station with her husband and child, hoping the election would bring change to the country as a whole.

“We shouldn’t be having to worrying about electricity and water. It’s been going on for years,” she told AFP. More than 29 million voters are registered but the last municipal elections, in 2021, drew fewer than half of them to the polls, with turnout at just 46 percent. Of the 2.6 million people approved to cast special votes over two days, only 1.4 million did so, the electoral commission said Tuesday.

The African National Congress (ANC), which led the country’s liberation struggle, remains projected to emerge as the largest party nationally, but polls point to a further erosion of its support. Once the dominant force in South African politics, the party of anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela fell below 50 percent of the vote for the first time in the 2021 municipal elections.

It suffered further losses at the 2024 national vote, securing just over 40 percent and forcing it to share power in a government of national unity with nine other parties. The liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), the country’s second-largest party, has set its sights on Johannesburg, campaigning hard to capitalise on service delivery failures in the ANC bastion.

Meanwhile, the breakaway opposition uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, led by former president Jacob Zuma, is mounting a strong challenge for the east coast port city of Durban. MK made a dramatic electoral breakthrough in 2024, drawing support away from the ANC to finish third nationally, with 14.5 percent of the vote. “We are going to start by taking back our country here,” Zuma said on Sunday in Durban, a city at the centre of growing anti-migrant sentiment that has become a prominent theme of the election campaign. – Hung municipalities – South Africans elect municipal councillors, who then choose mayors and form the administrations that will run their cities.

With outright majorities far from assured in several major cities, the vote could usher in another round of complex coalition negotiations, as parties bargain over the alliances needed to govern. Coalition rule is already a feature of local government, with 74 of the country’s 257 municipalities governed by coalitions or minority administrations by February 2026, according to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

The final results, expected on Sunday, will offer a clearer picture of the political landscape before the next general election in 2029. They will also carry implications for the ANC’s own future, with the party due to elect a new leader at its December 2027 conference — a contest that will help determine who leads it into the next national race. The election is likely to turn on what voters experience in their daily lives, rather than political loyalties, political analyst Kingsley Makhubela said, pointing to what he called “bread and butter issues” such as water, electricity, roads and sewage.

“People are not going to vote on sentiments,” the former diplomat told AFP. He also argued that coalition government could foster a new culture of political tolerance in South Africa’s increasingly fragmented political landscape, where, for years, “the language… has been political enemies”.