After the ANC suffers its worst defeat since end of apartheid …
Time for a mass working class party on a socialist programme
Commentators, analysts and political parties have engaged in a virtual competition for the most colourful hyperbole to capture the impact of the outcome of the local government elections on November 4th, 2026, on the ANC. The Independent Online headlined its analysis: “Death of the ANC.” Elections analyst Wayne Sussman told Business Day that the ANC had suffered a … devastating blow.” Another analyst described the outcome as the ANC’s “Sandinista moment.” Even before the elections Mondli Makhanya predicted that “in 2029 the last nail will go into the ANC’s coffin in 2029, and the procession to the cemetery will begin.” (Daily Maverick 30th August 2026)
“This is sort of now the end of the post-liberation era,” said William Gumede, a political scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand. The ANC “now will just be the equivalent of any other party” that will “have to fight for the vote or die over time,” he added.
The Financial Times’s David Pilling under the headline: “South Africa’s incredible shrinking ANC” declared that the movement of Nelson Mandela has been reduced to a minority party in the country’s largest cities. (It) became a rural party this week. That may overstate the liberation movement’s electoral shellacking in six of the country’s eight biggest metropolises, but not by much. The only place it can still reliably get the vote out is in the country’s rural heartlands.” (6/11/2026)
Expanding on his analysis, Sussman pointed out that the ANC’s Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero, deputy mayor Loyiso Masuku, and development planning Member of the Municipal Executive Committee, Eunice Mgcina “have all lost their seats in the Johannesburg council. The ANC will have no Proportional Representation councillors in all three Gauteng metros, just ward councillors”.
ANC secretary general Fikile Mbalula, uncharacteristically, indulged in the secular equivalent of self-flagellation. ANC leaders had become notorious for their arrogance. In previous elections former Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane insulted voters in Bekkersdal, saying “Keep your dirty votes.” Johannesburg Mayor Morero swore at one voter: “don’t talk Sh…”!
Speaking at the Independent Electoral Commission’s results operation centre (ROC), Mbalula said voters had spoken through the ballot and “if we fail to learn anything from these elections, we will never learn anything.” “And if anyone has not heard what the people are saying through this election, then we are lost. This has been a very catastrophic outcome for the ANC. That we say plainly. As much as we are the largest party, it has been catastrophic for the movement.”
Another thunderous rebuke
The working class electorate has spoken in tones even more thunderous than in 2024, when it marked three decades of ANC rule by ending its overall majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. The ANC may have emerged as the largest political party nationally, but with just 30.76% of the vote, it has lost its dominance in municipal councils, while the Democratic Alliance and ActionSA have strengthened their positions. The ANC secured outright control in only 53 municipalities and emerged as the leading party in 128 out of SA’s 257 municipalities. The humiliation of the ANC’s failure to retain control of a single one of the country’s 8 metros is exceeded only by its 2024 humiliation.
Across the eight metros, ANC support fell from 55% in 2011 to 20% for 2026. A decade and a half ago, in 2011, it won outright majorities in seven of the eight. After being left with only two in the last local government elections in 2021, it has now been completely wiped out in all.
In the city of its birth, Mangaung, in the Free State province, the ANC’s loss was “mitigated” by the embarrassing consolation of retaining its position as the largest party in the metro by the biggest crumb – beating the DA by less than 1 per cent. In its spiritual home and traditional stronghold, the Eastern Cape, birthplace of ANC political royalty – Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki and Chris Hani – injury turned to insult. In Nelson Mandela Bay, it has been humbled to just over 25%.
In SA’s commercial capital, Johannesburg, the ANC is down to 20.27% of the vote, in the political capital, Tshwane, 22%, down from 55.32%. The sharpest fall came in eThekwini, in KwaZulu-Natal where it is down to 16 % from 61% in 2011 – a 25 point drop since 2021 alone. In Cape Town, where its main rival, the DA, retained the outright majority it has had since 2006, the ANC has been reduced to a pitiful 13.95% – the lowest in the country.
A swing to the right?
There can be no doubt that these election results are historic. The reaction to their outcome across the board is understandable. There is, however, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum a lack of a sense of proportion, and even some hysteria.
DA supporters have celebrated its stronger electoral position as well as that of ActionSA, as a political and ideological vindication. DA claims that over 1m black voters supported it are credible. ActionSA increased its vote. It is led by Herman Mashaba, a black millionaire who made his money through a company he named “Black Like Me” from 1984-86 under apartheid – a period when the regime stepped up its repression of the black majority with the imposition of a brutal state of emergency with thousands detained and killed. The far right libertarian Free Market Foundation recognised his services to capitalism and appointed him chairperson. He left to join the Democratic Alliance from which he resigned to form ActionSA. The hallmark of his election campaign strategy is the promotion of anti-African immigrant xenophobia.
Excited DA supporters on social media stated: “We should note that more black voters supported the liberal DA, with its free-market principles, private property rights, and a smaller, more efficient state, over the EFF, which is dogmatic, communist, pro-nationalisation, and advocates an omnipotent state. This is a significant inflection point in African politics and offers hope for the nation’s economic future.
70% of adults did not vote. Of those who did vote, less than 50% supported socialist redistributive policies, while 30% supported liberal free-market policies. This marks a healthy shift away from traditional communalism towards a market economy among the active voters.”
But, as if to pinch themselves to make sure this is not a dream, they go on to ask: “The question is, to what extent will the efficiency of service delivery by coalitions reflect the mentality of the majority of communalists who did not bother to vote? If we accept the premise that the quality of service delivery reflects the mindset of residents, then the fact that the DA got a majority in Johannesburg cannot change much. Coalition politics can still make the DA irrelevant. Demographics = destiny.”[1]
Quite. For all the hype around the DA’s performance — a lead of 17 percentage points over the ANC – the reality is that whereas the ANC’s vote fell by a precipitous 15%, the DA’s vote at best held steady. Its level of voter support only appeared greater as a result of the massive fall in the ANC’s support than due to any actual significant increase in its own vote. This was much more a vote against the ANC than for either the DA or ActionSA.
As the more sober minded bourgeois analyst, Richard Calland points out:
“The non-ANC voter pool has grown from 46.09% to 68.22% since 2016, but the resulting fragmentation means that rather than settling on a new order, the electorate has thrown the political pack of cards high up in the air and they have landed in confounding fashion.
The question, for example, of who the winners of LGE 2026 are, is hard to answer. The DA will make the most of the fact that it has gained control of new councils and made some significant inroads in predominantly black voting districts, but if they are being honest with themselves, the DA’s leadership will be disappointed that they have increased their national share of the vote by less than 3% — from 21.81% in the 2024 national election to 24.64% last week, which is well short of the 26.9% that Maimane achieved 10 years ago.
ActionSA has a stronger claim to be the “winners,” as its performance in the three Gauteng metros of Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni mean that it will play a pivotal king-maker role in the negotiations to form viable coalition governments in these important cities. But, although it has more than doubled its share of the vote nationally (up from 2.33% in 2021), it is still only in fifth place with 5.67%.” (Business Day – 9/11/2026) (emphasis added)
Marxists are realists. The danger of xenophobia must not only not be underestimated; it must be fought. With their system in serious crisis, and growing workers and youth mass resistance worldwide, SA’s capitalist ruling political and economic, like their global counterparts, will continue to fund the orchestration of xenophobia and racism to divide and weaken the working class. But it is as mistaken to underestimate the enemy as it is to overestimate it. From mistaken estimates follow mistaken strategies and tactics and the failure to seize opportunities to defeat reaction.
In spite of the affinity between eg March on March, MKP, ActionSA and the PA, these results do not indicate that xenophobia was the main driving force.
As Calland points out: “The principal losers are easier to discern: the ANC, along with its two biggest breakaways, the EFF and the MKP. The EFF is a busted flush; and after its extraordinary performance from a standing start in 2014 when it won 14% of the national vote, MKP dropped to single figures.”
That the MKP has been reduced to a provincial Zulu chauvinist party unable to retain its position as the 3rd biggest party in parliament in 2024, is unsurprising. Party leader Jacob Zuma and the National High Command have run amok with multiple high-profile reshuffles and purges. These include the replacement of 18 MPs, sidelining its founder Jabulani Khumalo, replacing the first deputy president and national chairperson, the dismissal of its deputy secretary general, the repeated reshuffling of secretaries general including the first, EFF fugitive, Floyd Shivambu, and the last one on the eve of the election, as well as his own daughter. This chaos sparked mass resignations in Gauteng and calls for the entire national leadership.
“And while the Patriotic Alliance has gained a little in the Western Cape, elsewhere in the country voters seem to have seen through the bluff and bluster of the PA’s leader, Gayton McKenzie” Calland continues. The slight increase in the PA’s national total disguises the reality. Those votes are mainly from the rural areas in eg the Northern and Western Cape. The 6 seats it lost in Joburg are far more significant than the ones they gained in the country’s hinterland. Of the two lost wards, 17 and 18, covering Eldorado Park, Kliptown, Chiawelo and Pimville, 18 was contested by 63 parties, the highest number in the country. This amounted to a vote of no confidence in the PA.
Whilst xenophobia was not completely irrelevant, it was a far less significant factor than the burning “gatvol” anger towards the ANC.
Pessimism on the Left
If misplaced euphoria has resulted in light-headedness on the right, some on the left have greeted these results with gloom and doom. Dressing themselves in sackcloth and ashes, they have made their way to the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem with pessimism. “It is the end of the national democratic revolution – and we are pretending it is normal” declaimed political analyst Xolani Qubekha, holding back the tears. In the same vein, veteran left activist Mojalefi Musi appeals: “TO THE LEFT: I hope the Left in South Africa comes out of its own closet. This period is momentous! The voting patterns show that the pendulum swung to the right. Right-wing political parties have gained ascendancy.”
Reacting to the Economic Freedom Fighters’ loss of over 600 000 votes compared to 2021 and its decline to 6% from 10%, Malema blamed the ANC’s decision to enter into a Government of National Unity with the DA in 2024 for its electoral woes. “The former liberation movement had the opportunity to choose progressive forces and the left to form government, but they allowed those who have infiltrated them to guide them towards white supremacy, and white supremacy has taken over our metros today using their endorsement,” Malema said. (emphasis added)
This merely confirms the EFF’s attitude of condescension toward working class voters. Voters are not expected to have taken notice of or possibly even to have ignored the evidence its leadership has placed before them confirming that beneath its left populist pseudo-socialist rhetoric lie the same ambitions as the party it emerged from: the frustrated aspirations of the black capitalist class to ascend to the summits of the capitalist economy in numbers that correspond to the country’s demographics. The EFF’s quarrel is not with capital as such, but its colour. It is driven not by the desire for the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society, but to replace “white monopoly capital” with its black equivalent. For the EFF leadership, the lack of economic freedom is exemplified in the fact that African Rainbow Minerals, owned by President Ramaphosa’s brother-in-law, Patrice Motsepe has been the only wholly black owned company in the top 100 of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
The leadership appears to think that working class voters pay no attention to, or are unable to see through its hypocrisy revealed by: its post-2024 leadership crisis, the exodus of the majority of its top 5, its involvement in the corruption that led to the collapse of VBS in which black pensioners held their savings, the Madlanga Commission revelations of an attempted cover up, the post-2016 local government election coalition with the DA whilst denouncing it as a racist party of white monopoly capital, its unapologetic embrace of corrupt tobacco smuggler Adriano Mazzotti etc.
Does the SACP offer a working class socialist alternative?
Such is the despondency on the Left that some see in the SACP’s performance a glimmer of hope for a left alternative. The MWP will publish a more detailed analysis of the SACP’s role in future. For now, suffice it to say that those who see in the SACP’s performance a possible new dawn, exhibit the response of a person lost in the desert, raging with thirst, mistaking a mirage for an oasis. The SACP resolved to contest independently following the ANC’s entering a coalition with the DA to form the GNU. However, its claim that the ANC has abandoned the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) in favour of neo-liberalism is as hypocritical today as the party’s endorsement of the first edition of the GNU and their senior leaders’ participation in it with the Nationalist Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party in 1994. GNU 1.0 cleared the way politically for the burial of the Freedom Charter, the abandonment of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the imposition of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (Gear).
The ANC’s neo-liberalism, in other words, did not begin in 2024, but in 1996 with the imposition of Gear without consulting its Tripartite Alliance partners. As Comrade Vavi points out in his 2014 Open Letter to the SACP, the SACP leadership at first gave Gear a ringing endorsement. The self-proclaimed vanguard of the working class somersaulted, changing its position only under Cosatu’s pressure. Then as now, consistent with its default position to defend the capitalist ANC, the SACP leadership has entered the electoral plane independently to save the ANC. As millions of the working class march away from the ANC in search of class and political independence, the SACP leadership shuts the door to a workers’ party standing before them, like King Canute, to turn the tide of history in the opposite direction.
For any new party standing in the elections for the first time, securing 271 seats and a total of 2.38% as a national tally would undoubtedly be creditable. It won more seats than the Patriotic Alliance (192 seats) – the kingmaker star of previous elections. The big-business-funded Rise Mzansi, by comparison, won nine seats and no wards. Bosa, the party of former DA leader Mmusi Maimane, won seven seats and no wards.
The SACP cannot, however, be regarded as new. It is 105 years old. Much more importantly it cannot be regarded as a party that stands for a different programme from the ANC itself. It has been the ANC’s political appendage and ideological constabulary throughout most of its political life under the name Communist Party of SA at birth in 1921, and the SACP it was renamed as in 1953. Through its Stalinist two-stage theory of preserving capitalism under the cover of democracy, it has provided the theoretical cover for the perpetuation of the exploitation of the working class through the indefinite postponement of the second, socialist stage of the revolution.
Anyone who believes that the working class electorate has taken no notice of the SACP’s contradictions and betrayals shares the party’s contempt for them. The SACP insists on standing “independently” whilst defying ANC decisions to terminate their membership and even taking legal action against their expulsion. It claims to campaign against the ANC’s neo-liberalism but does not require its most senior leaders to surrender their cabinet positions and stop implementing the very same policies.
There is therefore no reason to account for the votes the SACP received differently from those of most other parties – anything but the ANC. With a programme not fundamentally different from the ANC’s, the SACP offered voters nothing more than an ANC alter ego that it would prop up in a coalition. Nearly one hundred and ten years after the October Revolution, the SACP still stands for socialism … but in the indefinite future.
2026 LGE outcome foreseeable and foreseen
These developments did not fall from a clear blue sky. (see our pre-election statement 16/10/2026) and others on previous elections on www.marxistworkersparty.net)
The outcome of the LGE 2026 shows that the vacuum on the Left is even more acute. While the voter turnout was higher, the number of eligible voters who went to the polls remained low. Of an estimated 44.9 million eligible, only 15.9m voted. About two-thirds – a figure that a winning party could justifiably claim as a landslide – the overwhelming majority, registered and unregistered, did not. The reason is that the working class sees in none of the parties any with a programme representing its class interests. The creation of such a party is the task at hand.
The filling of this vacuum is an urgent task. The pressure to hold the GNU stitched together in 2024 to keep the neo-liberal capitalist programme on track is much has ensure it endures despite one or two near death experiences at national level. With the exception of the metros, the consequences of a collapse are not quite the same in the hung councils, now up to 137 up from 66. It is a recipe for chaos. The primary budget surplus it has patted itself on the back for achieving for the past 3 years requires more savage social spending cuts.
The service delivery crisis, corruption and crime that the election was a revolt against, will worsen. The polarisation between the classes the GNU is aimed at concealing, will sharpen the pace and intensity of the class struggle. The GNU’s reliance on the xenophobic policies it has allowed eg March and March to determine will increase, to cut across the resistance the working class. The need for united mass resistance will be even greater on the street and on the political plane.
The MWP commends the Solidarity Action Committee Collective for contesting. The 453 votes cast may have been far below expectations, but the 2000 signed up to the SACC in the course of the campaign is a huge step forward and must be consolidated. The MWP also commends the Workers and Socialist Party for contesting in Palm Ridge. Just what is possible is shown by the victory of a small Northern Cape community. Within a mere 9 months after registering to contest, Rise Tsantsabane Communities won a majority in the Tsantsabane council. They took control from the ANC which was reduced to 3 of the 13 seats. The DA, EFF and PA secured 1 seat each. Similarly, in Xhora Mouth in the rural Eastern Cape, Phumzile Msaro, who fought a decade-long campaign for ambulances in Xhora Mouth, has been re-elected as the only independent in Mbhashe Ward 28, defeating 15 party candidates.
Amongst the opportunists careerist and place seekers who swelled the numbers of parties and candidates, there are many more genuine independents and communities that contested. The MWP believes that all these campaigns should have been coordinated before the election. We call upon all them to be brought together.
In each of the main theatres of struggle: communities, students/youth, women and the workplace, there are struggles, demonstrations and self-organisation.
The MWP calls for unity in struggle within and across all these arenas of struggle. We have published draft platforms and programmes of action to unite working class communities under a Socialist Civic Federation, youth and students under a Marxist Youth and Student Movement, and women under a Socialist Women’s Movement. We will shortly be publishing one for a Socialist Trade Union Confederation.
We view the unification of struggles in all these theatres as at the same time assembling of the forces for a mass working class party on a socialist programme. We call upon Saftu to reconvene the working class summit to implement the 2018 declaration.