Buffalo City’s political map has been redrawn, and the numbers behind that shift tell a story of collapsing incumbency and a market of voters moving decisively toward a new challenger. The African National Congress, long the dominant operator in the metro, took 42.0% of the vote in the 2026 local government elections, according to results from the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC). That figure sits 17.4 percentage points below its 59.4% in 2021 and marks the party’s lowest share in Buffalo City in its history. For the first time, the ANC has lost its majority in the metro.
The beneficiary of that erosion is the United Democratic Movement, whose 18.3% represents the largest gain of any party in the city. The trajectory is striking. The UDM held just 0.6% of the vote in 2011, edged up to 0.9% in 2016 and 1.0% in 2021, before jumping 17.3 percentage points this year. The surge also lifts the UDM past the Democratic Alliance, which had finished second in each of the three previous local elections in the metro, with 20.5% in 2011, 23.4% in 2016 and 19.5% in 2021. The DA lands on 16.9% this time.
Buffalo City is the first of South Africa’s eight metros to have its results finalised, making it an early indicator of how the 2026 contest is unfolding elsewhere.
Beyond the party-list shares, the ward-level arithmetic shows how thoroughly the ground has shifted. The UDM, which won no wards in Buffalo City in 2021, took three of the 49 wards declared. The ANC won 38, the DA six, and the EFF and the SACP one each. One remaining ward ended in a tie, with the DA and the EFF each taking 1 714 votes on the ward ballot there; the winner will be determined by lot, which in South Africa usually means a coin toss.
The contrast with 2021 is stark. Five years ago the ANC held 43 of the city’s 50 wards and the DA the other seven, a duopoly that has now given way to a more fragmented distribution of seats.
Meanwhile, the remaining parties in the field posted smaller shares. The Economic Freedom Fighters won 6.8% of the vote, while the South African Communist Party, standing in its first municipal election, took 4.5%.
For coalition watchers, the results suggest Buffalo City’s next council will be assembled rather than inherited. No party commands a majority, the ANC’s ward count falls well short of the 50 it once controlled outright, and the UDM’s sudden second-place position gives it leverage it has never held in the metro before. How those numbers translate into governing arrangements will be the next question, but the calculus of the city has plainly changed: the incumbent’s share has been cut by more than a quarter in five years, and the challenger that profited most did so from a base of barely one percent a decade ago.