Mzansi’s King Canute

For the first time in three decades 10% to 15% of ANC supporters are willing to stay at home or shift their support to another party, fundamentally changing future political power dynamics in South Africa, recent polling from at least three institutions has shown.

This could mean that the ANC’s support could plummet further in the next election, after its decline in support of 17 percentage points in the general election last year. 

The party seems to view that election outcome as a temporary setback, one that it will have to put up with for a few years before returning to business as usual and governing alone after the 2029 election.

In talks over the weekend between the ANC and its GNU partners, including the DA, the ANC conceded that an alternative to the VAT hike should be found. However, tensions with the DA reached a boiling point, with calls for the erstwhile opposition party to exit the government. 

Presidential hopeful Paul Mashatile last week likened the tie-up with the DA in the GNU to crossing a river by “lying on the back of a crocodile” — the river, presumably, being the interregnum until 2029. Similarly, ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, who also sees himself as a presidential contender, has said the ANC “hates the GNU”.

While politics is the art of the possible, surveys conducted since June by the Social Research Foundation, the Brenthurst Foundation and the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR) indicate ANC optimism would be badly misplaced.

This polling by credible research organisations, combined with analysis of municipal by-elections since the May 2024 election, show a steady shift in attitudes among a significant chunk of formerly diehard ANC voters.

Gareth van Onselen, CEO of Victory Research, tells the FM the decline in support for the ANC began about 20 years ago. It peaked with just under 70% of the national vote under former president Thabo Mbeki in 2004, but in 2009 support dipped to 65.9% and has been on an increasingly slippery slope ever since.

“The ANC’s support has systematically shrunk,” Van Onselen says. “What happens when a party loses support is that the first people to go are those not very committed.”

In last year’s election, he says, it was just the “core support base” that backed the party — the “diehard supporter”. 

Van Onselen says the polling since 2024 suggests that 10%-15% of that core base is now open to moving away, which is “deeply significant” — it would be the first such desertion by “die-in-the-ditch” voters. 

This presents an opportunity for Jacob Zuma’s MK Party and Julius Malema’s EFF. The DA, too, could benefit from this shift, and seems to have already done so to a degree.

“The core support trends for each party suggest that there are two phases that fluid ANC voters go through,” says Van Onselen. “The first phase is kind of to opt out. So if things get difficult, as they did in February [during the worst of the budget impasse], where there were a great many contentious issues playing out, these voters become undecided.

“They don’t move to other parties, they just are not that bound to the ANC, and kind of step away from politics. There are various issues, and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what they are, but the VAT issue was probably one of them.

“The second phase is they actually are willing to align with other parties. On the back of that VAT week, it seems that some of the 10%-15% of voters broke three ways between the DA, the EFF and MK.”

Van Onselen says these shifts are fluid and no party can expect dependable loyalty from the increasingly volatile electorate.

Elections analyst Wayne Sussman has tracked by-election trends since May last year, which also indicate fundamental shifts in sentiment.

The results show that while the ANC remains vulnerable in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, the Northern Cape and Mpumalanga, its performance in its rural strongholds — the Eastern Cape and Limpopo — remains “rock solid”, he says.

But ANC support is eroding rapidly in urban and semi-urban areas.

Sussman says the EFF and MK have generally struggled in by-elections, though Zuma’s party has had some wins in KZN and it recently won its first ward in the North West.

Interestingly, the DA picked up some support in semi-urban, mainly black areas in Emfuleni in Gauteng and in KwaDukuza in KZN — a first for the party.

According to the IRR poll, released on Tuesday, DA support among black voters has grown three-fold since May last year, from 5% to 18%, and the party has even pulled ahead of the ANC with 30.3% against the ANC’s 29.7%.

But Van Onselen says the DA should not get too excited.

“It’s in the middle of a very tumultuous period and I think the DA will lose some of that support. It also loses support as elections get closer — but yes, there has been a small, undoubted benefit to the DA for being in the GNU,” he says.

The party has demonstrated stability and policy predictability, generating greater trust in the government, Van Onselen says — but there are also drawbacks for the DA, which could hurt it in the long term.

“The short-term benefit for the DA, and by short term I’m talking about one electoral cycle, is to produce a stable or relatively stable government that keeps MK and the EFF out,” he says.

“The long-term threats, over five to 10 years, are that in doing so, it sacrifices its legitimacy as an independent opposition. It’s taken decades to build the DA up to where it is, but it could become subsumed by grand failures in the GNU. Yes, it can point to some wins in areas it controls, but what if the economy doesn’t grow, unemployment increases? Then you get blamed along with the ANC.”

It is a difficult position for the DA, and it is related to the ANC’s attitude towards the GNU. It seems to think its partners are there simply to help it to implement its own policies and vision for the country, and not for serious consultation.

Lawson Naidoo, executive director of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, says the failure of the GNU to embrace mutually beneficial give-and-take should be laid at the door of President Cyril Ramaphosa. 

“Cyril’s leadership has failed. It’s been left to Fikile [Mbalula] and Helen [Zille], party officials who should play no role in the actual government. They’re not part of the GNU. That has been a big failure.”

Naidoo says that once the GNU cabinet was in place, Ramaphosa should have — but didn’t — set up a true unity government. “In other jurisdictions, they would have complex, multiparty sets of cabinet subcommittees to deal with issues like [the budget],” he says. If such structures existed, the impasse over the VAT increase could have been averted. 

Instead, Ramaphosa continued with business as usual, as if the ANC had not shed 17 percentage points and failed to win an outright majority. He showed an unwillingness to compromise, even when the situation became untenable, and did not do the basics — which was at the very least to engage seriously with his partners in the government, Naidoo says.

The broader implication of Ramaphosa’s failures and of Mashatile and Mbalula’s publicly stated positions on the GNU is that the ANC is in denial about the possibility that its electoral woes will extend beyond 2029.  But coalitions are here to stay, and if the ANC fails to accept this and change its behaviour accordingly, it will only continue to haemorrhage support.