The African National Congress is on course to lose control of most of South Africa’s major cities in Wednesday’s local elections, according to polling data, potentially disrupting power dynamics in the national coalition government.

Several polls suggest the party’s remaining support is increasingly concentrated in smaller towns and rural provinces as opposition parties make deeper inroads in the biggest cities that drive Africa’s largest economy. The local government vote will decide who runs 250-plus municipalities responsible for basic service provision including water, sanitation, and refuse collection. It is the ANC’s first nationwide test since falling support forced it to share power in 2024 after losing its parliamentary majority — unprecedented in the democratic era.

The latest Ipsos poll, conducted between Sept. 12 and Oct. 13, put the ANC’s national support at an “all-time low” of 30%, reflecting just how far its backing in urban areas has fallen. Roughly 30% of respondents in Johannesburg, the nation’s commercial hub, and Tshwane, home of the capital Pretoria, said they would vote for the ANC. And that figure fell to just 10% in the port city of Durban, where the populist uMkhonto weSizwe Party (or MK), which is pressing for sweeping state control of the economy and built around former president Jacob Zuma, is comfortably ahead in polls.

Support for the ANC, the party once led by Nelson Mandela, remains near 60% in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, vast provinces of villages, small towns, and dispersed settlements that remain far less urbanized than Gauteng or the Western Cape, an earlier Ipsos poll showed. “After 30 years of democracy, voting patterns are changing and we are moving into a completely new reconfiguration of the political spectrum,” said Andre Duvenhage, a political analyst at South Africa’s North-West University.

The Ipsos survey and several other polls — if replicated on voting day — indicate that most metropolitan municipalities would require coalition governments after the local elections. This broadly matches the assessment of think tank Oxford Economics, which has predicted that voting in six of the eight metros would fail to produce an outright winner, creating the need for coalition negotiations.

A poor ANC showing would “upend the power dynamics” inside the national coalition government, said William Gumede, a political analyst and governance professor at the Johannesburg-based University of Witwatersrand. He argued that if the ANC’s share of the vote was close to or fell below the Democratic Alliance, it would force the former liberation movement to treat its junior partner “as an equal power” in policy-making and government decisions.

The two parties became governing partners after the 2024 general election for the first time, bringing ideological rivals into the same government where the ANC remains committed to state-led economic transformation policies while the DA has pushed for bigger private investment.

Know More Political parties have entered the final stretch of campaigning with failures of local government providing much of the ammunition. Unreliable water supplies, deteriorating roads, corruption, and mismanagement of municipal finances, have left many councils struggling to provide basic services.

Companies are increasingly paying for the failures, said Busi Mavuso, CEO of lobby group Business Leadership South Africa, whose members account for nearly a third of the country’s $490 billion GDP. She said businesses are investing in backup water storage, private security, and road repairs to remain operational. “Capital is not sentimental,” she said, warning that investors can redirect money when infrastructure and municipalities fail.

That makes the quality of municipal governments formed after the election important to investors, according to Awongiwe Booi, a fixed income analyst at South African lender Investec. “The alignment and performance of the coalition post the election will matter more than the poll results themselves,” she said. South Africa’s eight metros house about 40% of the population and account for an outsized share of economic activity.

Tiisetso’s view ory from an investor’s perspective is that a weaker ANC is better for public finances. That deserves testing. For starters, there is a risk over what the party does to win voters back or retain those largely rural areas, where official data shows that these countryside towns accounted for nearly 60% of the country’s poor in 2023. Under such circumstances the ANC, in its effort to recover voters and shore up support, would have every reason to demonstrate that the government can deliver more on its campaign promises to expand public employment and automatically enrol grant-receiving households for free basic services.

The spending pressure is hardly hypothetical, with Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana saying government departments have asked for more than 700 billion rand ($41 billion) in additional spending over the next three years, more than a third of everything the government expected to spend this year. “That money simply doesn’t exist,” he told a local radio station last month.

Even so, an electoral decline makes saying no politically harder, creating a longer term political risk. It might just embolden those arguing that a post-President Cyril Ramaphosa ANC should move toward MK Party and Economic Freedom Fighters, a radical left movement advocating for nationalization of mines and banks, and ditch the market friendly DA, which has long struggled to shake off its image seen by many Black voters as a party of white interests.

There’s nothing irrational about voters demanding more from a state where a third of the work force is unemployed and ranks highest in the World Bank inequality index. The problem is that political need does not create fiscal space.

Room for Disagreement David Omojomolo, Africa economist at research house Capital Economics, said fears about the coalition government stability after the election are overdone, and expects the macroeconomic impact of the vote to be limited, with borrowing costs constraining the recovery remaining on track.

His comment rests on the DA, rather than MK or the EFF, picking up the ANC losses, which the polls support in Gauteng. “That should compel the next ANC leader to continue to follow business-and-investor-friendly policies, including the commitment to fiscal consolidation,” he said.

Notable Unpaid bills owed to municipalities have grown more than seven-fold since 2011 to nearly 500 billion rand ($30 billion), Investec noted, a measure of the fiscal hole new councils will inherit.