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The African National Congress (ANC) may have suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1994, but an analysis of the 2026 local government election results shows that the party remains by far the most geographically widespread political force in South Africa. Despite winning just 30.6% of the national ward vote, the ANC secured 58.6% of the country’s 4 485 ward seats.

The figures reveal an important distinction between the ANC’s declining share of the national vote and the extent to which its support remains spread across South Africa. Although the party now attracts fewer than one in three ward votes nationally, it continues to win more than half of the country’s wards. This means that across large parts of South Africa, the ANC remains the party best positioned to win local electoral contests, even where its support has declined substantially.

The explanation lies in South Africa’s ward electoral system, in which the candidate who receives the most votes wins the ward, regardless of whether that candidate secures an outright majority. An ANC candidate who wins 35% of the vote against several opposition candidates who each secure less than that will take the ward, even though most voters supported other parties.

This helps explain why the ANC’s share of ward seats is almost twice its share of the ward vote. The party benefits from having support distributed across a large number of communities, while the opposition vote is divided among several competing parties.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) secured 24.5% of the national ward vote, only 6.1 percentage points behind the ANC, but won just 19.5% of the country's wards. While the ANC converted its 30.6% vote share into 58.6% of ward seats, the DA secured a smaller proportion of wards than its national vote share would suggest.

The same pattern is visible among several other opposition parties. ActionSA secured 5.3% of the national ward vote but won just 1.2% of wards. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) won 6.2% of the national ward vote but secured only 0.8% of wards. The Freedom Front Plus (FF+) won 3.0% of the national ward vote but just 0.2% of wards.

There were exceptions. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) secured 6.8% of ward seats against 4.7% of the national ward vote, demonstrating the advantage that geographically concentrated support can offer, with the IFP being most popular in northern KwaZulu-Natal.

The uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), meanwhile, secured 9.7% of the national ward vote and 9.2% of ward seats, and like the IFP, had its support geographically concentrated, also in KwaZulu-Natal..

The chart below shows each party’s share of wards won and share of the ward vote.

The significance of these results extends beyond the number of ward councillors elected. They show that the ANC’s electoral decline has not yet translated into the disappearance of its political presence across the country. It retains a widespread electoral base that allows it to win local contests even as its national vote share collapses.

That matters for the future of South African politics. The ANC has lost its ability to command the majority support it once enjoyed, but the party has not been displaced as the dominant political presence across much of the country. Its opponents have succeeded in taking millions of votes away from it, yet they remain too divided to defeat it at ward level in many communities.

The 2026 election results therefore tell two stories about the ANC. The first is of a party whose national political dominance has been broken. The second is of a party whose support remains sufficiently widespread to win nearly six in ten wards across South Africa.