Johannesburg Election: The DA Leads the ANC in South Africa's Economic Capital

South Africans are voting today in municipal elections that will decide who runs the country's cities, and the most watched contest is not for a parliament or a presidency but for Johannesburg, the economic capital where the African National Congress, the party that led the country out of apartheid in 1994, is polling behind its main rival. More than 29 million people are registered to vote at 23,696 voting stations, choosing councillors for eight metropolitan municipalities, 44 district councils and 205 local councils, with more than 500 parties on ballots across the country. Polls close at 9 p.m. local time, and the Electoral Commission has a week to declare the results, with the first results expected on Sunday.

The scale of the ANC's decline is what makes this vote more than a local contest. The party once commanded overwhelming majorities, but it fell below half the vote in municipal elections for the first time in 2021, then lost its parliamentary majority in the 2024 national election with 40.2 percent of the vote, forcing it into a government of national unity. Now Ipsos puts its national support at about 30 percent, down from its 2021 municipal showing, with the Democratic Alliance (DA) close behind at about 25 to 28 percent depending on the survey. The numbers describe a party that is still likely to be the largest nationally, but no longer a dominant one, and a political system moving from one-party rule toward permanent coalition bargaining.

Johannesburg concentrates that story. The city has had five mayors in four years, a churn that tells its own story about unstable coalitions and failing services. The DA has fielded Helen Zille, its 75-year-old former leader, as its mayoral candidate, and two pollsters put the DA ahead of the ANC in the city: Ipsos has the DA at 30 percent against the ANC's 27 percent, while MarkData puts the DA further ahead, at 35 percent against 22 percent. The gap between those two surveys matters. The Ipsos margin is within the range where turnout and late-counted ballots could still change the order, while the MarkData margin would be a clear rejection. I read them together as pointing the same way, but not yet as proof.

What voters are punishing is concrete rather than abstract. Campaign reporting from Johannesburg returns again and again to the same list: water outages, power cuts and crumbling infrastructure. The auditor-general awarded clean audits, the highest standard of financial management, to only 39 of South Africa's 257 municipalities in 2024/25. That is the administrative backdrop to the politics: a party that cannot keep the water running in its richest city cannot ask voters to trust it with the city itself, whatever its history.

Yet a plurality in Johannesburg is not the same as power in Johannesburg, and that distinction is where this election gets genuinely uncertain. South Africans do not elect mayors directly; they vote for parties and ward councillors, and each new council elects its mayor at its first sitting, within 14 days of the results being declared. Zille would need coalition partners to govern, and the arithmetic is awkward: ActionSA, polling around 10 percent, has ruled out working with her in Johannesburg, and the ANC itself has three possible mayoral candidates amid factional infighting. A DA lead in votes could therefore end in weeks of negotiation, or in an ANC mayor chosen as the price of someone else's coalition. The vote tells us who Johannesburg prefers; the council will tell us who Johannesburg gets.

The rest of the map warns against reading this as a simple two-party swing. In Tshwane, which contains Pretoria, Ipsos puts the DA ahead of the ANC, 34 percent to 31 percent. In eThekwini, which contains Durban, the picture is different again: former president Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, contesting a local election for the first time, is polling at about 47 percent, with the ANC down around 10 percent from the 42 percent it won there in 2021. Fragmentation, not a single opposition surge, is the national pattern, and it is why hung councils and coalition talks are expected in most major metros.

That is also why I am not simply copying the prediction market's view. On 27 October, Polymarket priced Zille at about 52 percent to become Johannesburg's next mayor, on thin trading of roughly $135,000 in that market. That is a market for the mayoral outcome, not for the vote share, and the lower price makes sense: traders are pricing the coalition step that the polls do not measure. My own judgement is narrower and, I think, firmer: on the votes themselves, the DA will finish ahead of the ANC in Johannesburg. Two independent pollsters agree on the direction, the ANC's national trend points the same way, and Johannesburg's service failures give voters a specific reason to move. The honest caveat is turnout, which was only 46 percent in 2021, and the fact that the Ipsos lead is small enough that a different electorate on the day could still reverse it.

Watch the margin when the count comes in, not just the winner. A narrow DA lead means a long coalition negotiation in which the ANC, even in second place, remains a kingmaker. A wide one means Johannesburg has delivered the clearest verdict yet on thirty years of ANC rule in the city where South Africa's economy is actually run. Either way, the era in which the ANC could take its largest city for granted is already over; Sunday's results will say how far past it the country has moved.