Come the announcement of South Africa’s 2026 local election results, we are likely to see coalitions confirmed as the government reality of the future. Multiparty coalition government could become the rule rather than the exception. Beyond the immediate results, we shall simultaneously be aware that political parties in this evolving dispensation will have to “grow up”, graduate from incessant power games, and dedicate themselves to sound, constructive governance.

The likely continuous growth in the number of coalition governments has been part of my own analysis in the last decade. I have argued, for example in my analyses at the Daily Maverick‘s The Gathering in Cape Town, and the Cool Politics assembly of Democracy Works in Johannesburg, that under certain conditions close to or over half of South Africa’s 257 municipalities could have coalition governments following the November 2026 elections.

This analysis No. 3 reflects on the trends – and flags pertinent sets of numbers that will be informing analyses of the coalition road as it unfolds in the weeks ahead. A future edition will explore the criteria for enhanced maturity in local coalition governance in South Africa.

There are conditionalities that will determine whether the total number of coalitions will indeed extend upward, and to what extent. The core premise undergirding my expectation of an upward trend is the polling trends of the last year.

Despite modest variations, polls in the last year from Ipsos, Social Research Foundation, News24/SABI, and eNCA-MarkData have been quite consistent, confirming the following trends in voting patterns in 2026:

The ANC continues to decline (substantially), in terms of its poll-based support. The MKP is the party that has been rising most, over a wide front. While it is not supplanting the ANC altogether, it has been gaining significant blocs of support, largely off the ANC.

The DA grows modestly or holds ground. It is narrowing the gap between itself and the ANC mainly because of ANC shrinkage.

The EFF is holding ground or gaining a touch of support. The IFP does well only in specific corners of KwaZulu-Natal. The IFP is also ceding support to the MKP. A related conditionality to a rise in the number of post-election municipal governments is that the MKP would not grow to the extent of taking over more than a few of the KwaZulu-Natal councils.

Small parties around the three percent level of national support include the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), Patriotic Alliance (PA) and ActionSA. They could also be significant coalition players. The load of micro parties (often newly formed) is predictably not registering on the national and metropolitan poll fronts. Multitudes of these parties find their roots in specific communities and regions. They could become components of a range of municipal coalitions. The IEC’s list of 579 contesting political parties (plus 621 independents) bears evidence of the variety. From experience we know that more than half of the micros are unlikely to win any of the 10,526 available seats.

As the municipalities stand on the eve of LGE2026, the ANC remains in charge (on outright majorities) in approximately 105 of the total of 205 local municipalities in South Africa. Yet, the ANC’s majority margins are often small. If one transfers the opinion poll findings onto margins by which council majorities are held, there are definite prospects for a steep rise in the number of coalition municipalities. The DA and IFP each has a handful of municipalities under sole control as well – the DA mostly in the Western Cape and the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal.

In 2021 the DA’s total number of councils held by outright majority was shrinking and prospects included that its tally of sole-control councils will go down further in 2026, especially as parties like the PA gain seats.

At this stage of pre-election play, indications are that the MKP will not rise dramatically in its number of municipalities gained by outright majority, although there will be important inroads. In most cases, the MKP will rise as significant power bloc in municipalities, especially in KwaZulu-Natal, but possibly also in other provinces. The party will be a serious contender for inclusion in governing coalitions – unless the provincial KZN model of keep-MKP-out coalitions is repeated locally.

Municipalities in South Africa under coalition government continuously or at some point in the 2021-2026 municipal term

SA Coalition Municipalities

The details in the table above show the benchmarks against which the results from LGE2026 will be compared. The outcomes will be reported in post-election editions of SA Coalitions Brief.

The total of 93 coalition municipalities for the 2021-2026 term (my own research), out of the total of 257 municipalities, shows that a further 35 municipalities would have to proceed into coalition statuses for a level of more than half of SA municipalities to be reached. This is high but possible, given both the survey trends and the fact that even just by-elections in the last five years have already delivered notable declines in the number of municipal councils under outright ANC control.

Up to LGE 2021, South Africa had been maintaining a relatively consistent number of coalition councils, especially prevalent in the KwaZulu-Natal and Western Cape provinces. The 2021 spread remained concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, Western and Northern Cape, but extended numerically across all nine provinces.

The steep rise from 2016 to 2021 in the number of coalition municipalities from 27 to 70 (local and metropolitan, at the time of the release of the election results), indicates that ‘exponential’ leaps are possible. Up to 2016, the totals resulting from the preceding local elections of 2000, 2006 and 2011, had been quite consistent, namely 29, 30 and 33.

These figures reflect mostly cases of the ANC relinquishing outright majority statuses. In the elections of 2021, the ANC’s decline by 8.4 percentage points from 2016 to 2021, generated much of the new space for coalitions. In 2016 the ANC’s decline was already regarded as a watershed, although at that stage seen by the ANC as reversible. Former DA-majority councils also featured. In the Western Cape specifically, the DA in 2021 lost outright control in six municipalities: Beaufort West, Oudtshoorn, Cape Agulhas, Saldanha Bay, Breede Valley and Langeberg. In the rest of the provinces, the spread could be attributed mostly to ANC decline.The three parties in LGE 2021 that were the biggest seat losers were the ANC (-614 seats), DA (-288 seats) and Cope (-31 seats).

Most of the 27 hung councils of the 2016 term retained their coalition status in 2021. Continuity and reversals, and the extent to which a phenomenon of “once a coalition government, always a coalition government” applies will be an important trend to watch as LGE 2026 launches SA into the political future.