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Of South Africa’s eight metros only three are not governed by coalitions.

One of these is Cape Town, where the governing Democratic Alliance (DA) has a fairly comfortable majority, having won 58.3% of the vote in the 2021 local government elections (LGE).

Of the other seven metros, the only other two that are not governed in coalition are Mangaung (Bloemfontein) and Buffalo City (KuGompu, formerly East London).

In those two cities the African National Congress (ANC) has a majority. In Mangaung the ANC won just below 51% of the vote in the 2021 LGE, while in Buffalo City the ANC secured 59.4%.

But how secure is the DA’s majority in Cape Town? What does the trend tell us?

Below is the total number of votes and proportion of votes won by the DA, ANC, and other parties between 2000 (the year the DA was founded and also the first time an LGE was held under our current system of municipal governance) and 2021.

The DA won a majority in the city in 2000, but lost it again in 2002, when the New National Party (NNP) – which had formed the DA with the Democratic Party in 2000 – left the DA and formed a coalition with the ANC in the city (in 2005 the NNP disbanded and formally merged with the ANC).

The DA then secured a governing coalition in the city in 2006 under Helen Zille, when she managed to cobble together a seven-party coalition to govern Cape Town. The party then managed to secure a respectable majority in the city in 2011, having swallowed up Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats.

The DA’s high-water mark was in 2016, when it won two-thirds of the vote in the city. This is also the DA’s best election overall to date, winning nearly 27% of the national vote.

In 2021 the DA saw its vote share drop by more than eight points. However, the party still secured a relatively comfortable majority. The ANC saw its vote share drop by just under six points, but the trend to watch is the rise in the proportion of “other” parties, which won nearly a quarter of the vote, the most ever won by parties other than the ANC and the DA under our current system of municipal governance. In total, 17 parties won seats on the Cape Town municipal council, the most ever (in 2016 there had been 13 parties that won seats on the city council, while in 2000 there had been eight, showing how the electorate is fracturing).

However, one should be careful when comparing the 2021 LGE with other elections. The 2021 LGE took place in relatively unique circumstances, at the end of the Covid pandemic, which likely helped to depress turnout. It had almost been unconstitutionally postponed, before court challenges had forced the government to hold the election on the last constitutionally possible day. This could all have affected political parties’ campaigns and people’s enthusiasm to vote, but the election is still an important data point.

But could the DA lose another eight points between 2021 and 2026 and see it short of a majority in Cape Town?

There are other data points to look at to determine how likely this possibility is. The first is the 2024 national election. In that poll in Cape Town the DA won 53.1% of the vote, slightly more than the 53.0% it won in the 2019 national elections.

While the national elections have no impact on the make-up of municipal councils (just as the LGEs have no impact on the make-up of Parliament or the nine provincial legislatures) they can provide important clues into political trends.

The fact that the DA’s vote remained fairly stable between 2019 and 2024 bodes well for the party in the 2026 LGE.

However, a spoiler in Cape Town could be the Patriotic Alliance (PA), which has won a swathe of municipal by-elections off both the ANC and the DA across the country, with a large number in the Western Cape. It has been successful in positioning itself as a coloured nationalist party, which has seen it enjoy some recent electoral success. But will it be able to replicate this in Cape Town in the 2026 LGE?

Here again we can look at the national election results in the city to give us some insight. In the 2024 national election the PA won 4.1% of the vote in the city, compared to the 7.3% it won across the province in that election, suggesting that the party performs better in the rural Western Cape than in Cape Town.

However, the PA won only 0.03% of the vote in Cape Town (461 votes) in the 2019 national elections, but this jumped to 4.1% (just over 50 000 votes) in 2024.

In the 2016 and 2021 LGEs the PA has seen some growth in Cape Town, but it was not as remarkable as that seen between 2019 and 2024 in the city. In the 2016 poll it won 0.2% of the vote, in 2021 it had grown modestly to 1.4%.

The final data point is that there have been 11 by-elections in Cape Town since the 2021 LGE but the PA has stood in only two. However, in those two it did fairly well. In 2023 it won a by-election but benefitted from the fact that both the DA and the ANC failed to register candidates in time. The other by-election in which it stood was in Manenberg, in a ward where most people are coloured. While the DA defended its seat (seeing its vote share drop from 60.6% in the 2021 LGE to 42.6% in the by-election) the PA saw its vote share go from 1.6% to 19.9% (or from 146 votes to 1 146 votes). The National Coloured Congress (NCC) also saw its vote share grow, going from 3.6% in 2021 (or 255 votes) to 21.0% (1 212 votes) in the by-election.

In the final analysis the DA is likely to hold onto its majority in Cape Town. While it could face a serious challenge from coloured nationalist parties, such as the PA and the NCC, the DA’s vote share held up relatively well in Cape Town between 2019 and 2024, which could be an indicator that something similar may happen between 2021 and 2026.

It may be that urban coloured voters in Cape Town are less likely to vote for coloured nationalist parties than their rural counterparts, but this remains to be seen.

In addition, the DA could see some of its potential losses in Cape Town among coloured voters be cancelled out by gains among black voters. In a by-election in Dunoon (where most of the residents are black) in March this year the DA won 15.9% of the vote (up from 7.6% in the 2021 LGE) and saw its number of raw votes more than double from 367 to 796.

Like most incumbent parties, the DA could see some losses, but it is likely to retain its majority in Cape Town in the next LGE. But the beachheads that the PA has secured in the rural Western Cape could be used to stage an assault on Cape Town. The DA cannot afford to be complacent.