For residents of Johannesburg’s townships and Cape Town’s Cape Flats, the local government elections will decide more than which party runs the council. They will shape daily life: whether water pipes are replaced, whether streetlights work, whether police can curb gangsterism, and whether the country’s two biggest governing parties can learn to work together after the votes are counted.
Independent election analyst Michael Atkins said this week that the true significance of the polls would lie in how parties conduct themselves during coalition negotiations. “Irrespective of any possible legislation, we need to build up a culture of respect across divides, where the needs of voters are prioritised over short-term interests,” he said. His warning speaks directly to voters who have watched unstable councils disrupt service delivery in the past.
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Atkins pointed to public opinion polls suggesting the ANC could fall below 30% in Johannesburg. A key implication, he explained, would be the possibility of an overhang, in which the party retains more wards than its total proportional representation seat allocation. That gap could reach as high as five seats, leaving the ANC without PR councillors.
Professor Sethulego Matebesi of the University of the Free State, head of the Department of Sociology, predicted a hung council in Johannesburg. He cited the MarkData poll, which placed the DA at 35% and the ANC at 21.8%. But he urged caution about what such numbers mean for ordinary voters. “Polls like this struggle to model who will actually vote in low-turnout local elections,” he said. In his view, a high turnout matters more than any campaign issue, because participation, not messaging, will decide outcomes.
In Cape Town, that turnout question is central to whether the DA keeps its majority. The party has seen some decline in support there, yet its provincial results in 2019 and 2024 were better than its national performance, pointing to core local support remaining intact. Matebesi expects the Patriotic Alliance to draw significant electoral support, eating into the DA’s share. He called the post-election coalition environment “a real test for political parties and voters”, and noted that black voters have increasingly associated themselves openly with parties like the Freedom Front Plus, a shift whose effects will only become clear in later elections.
Meanwhile, crime and safety weigh heavily on communities in the Cape Flats and in the townships of Langa, Khayelitsha, Gugulethu and Nyanga. The debate has been sharpened by the DA’s mooted plan to spend millions on a nine-kilometre concrete barrier along the N2 highway between Baden-Powell Road and Bhunga Avenue. Matebesi noted that 45.3% of Cape Town residents blame the national government for gangsterism, against 25.3%, which limits the damage to the DA. He added that whether the wall is “racially divisive” is a value judgement on which public opinion splits depending on where people live, and that the acting police minister has said such walls cannot replace policing.
Dr Oscar van Heerden, a research associate and senior research fellow at the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for African Diplomacy and Leadership, sees it differently. He strongly opposes the plan by Executive Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, describing it as “racially-motivated” and a dangerous precedent that would create prison-like territories around the city. He also disputed the DA’s clean-governance record, saying the party ran several metros after 2016 without turning them around, and that courts have agreed services are skewed toward affluent suburbs at the expense of poor black townships.
DA Johannesburg mayoral candidate Helen Zille has made service delivery the centrepiece of her campaign under the theme “Now or Never: Don’t Joburg’s Last Chance”. She listed fixing the city’s finances, installing honest and capable people, declaring war on corruption, making the municipality work for residents and restoring law and order as priorities. At the party’s last rally she argued that Cape Town replaces old water and sewer pipes at five times Johannesburg’s rate, keeps lights on during Eskom cuts, has more working streetlights in Khayelitsha than in Sandton, and has created 120 000 more jobs since 2016 than the other seven metros combined. She also pointed to 12 consecutive clean audits in DA-run Midvaal.
The ANC, with President Ramaphosa as the face of its campaign, has pledged to turn around municipal service delivery. Its first 100 days plan includes investing at least 8% of municipal asset values into maintenance, having 50% or more municipalities achieve clean audits, and allocating procurement and employment shares for women (40%), youth (20%) and people with disabilities (3%). Ramaphosa has attacked the DA’s record, calling Cape Town “a tale of two cities” where wealthy areas enjoy high-tier infrastructure while townships struggle with water, housing and sanitation. He has pledged to root out corruption and criminal infiltration within the SA Police Service.
Behind the campaigning, coalition arithmetic looms. With Zille ruling out any deal with the EFF and MK Party, analysts suggest the ANC would be the DA’s perfect partner. According to experts, a post-election ANC-DA coalition could be in the offing, though such a combination is stable but politically costly for both sides, and an ANC-led alliance with MK, the EFF and ActionSA, while arithmetically possible, would be hard to hold together. For voters on the ground, whichever combination emerges will determine who answers for the services they depend on every day.