The South African Communist Party (SACP), a longtime partner of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Tripartite Alliance, along with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has said it will be contesting the upcoming local government elections (LGE) on its own ticket for the first time.

Previously its candidates and members stood on ANC tickets, and held dual membership of both parties. SACP members have served as ANC cabinet ministers, and still do, but with the SACP now deciding to go its own way, the ANC has said that ANC-SACP dual members need to choose between the two parties in the LGE.

But how is the SACP likely to perform in the LGE? Will the party make any impact?

We have a few data points, as the party has stood in by-elections before, but things don’t look good for the Communists.

The first time the SACP stood in an election was in a municipal by-election in 2017 when a snap election was held to elect an entirely new council in Metsimaholo (Sasolburg) in the Free State, after the council failed to pass a budget. The SACP won nearly 9% of the vote, giving it three of the 42 council seats. Despite that relatively good performance, the SACP decided to once again run under the ANC banner in the 2021 LGE, and the 2019 and 2024 national elections.

But since 2025 the party has run in nine other municipal by-elections. In none of those did it mount any serious challenge with its best performance being the 12% it won in a by-election in Winnie Madikizela-Mandela Municipality, in the Eastern Cape bordering KwaZulu-Natal. This was the only by-election in which it won more than 10% of the vote.

The party also fails to show up in polling by the Social Research Foundation (SRF).

Gareth van Onselen, who runs Victory Research, which conducts the SRF’s polling, told The Common Sense, “The SRF polls ask an open-ended voting intention question. This means any respondent can name any political party, and the poll will capture it. So, historically, it is an accurate measure of the SACP’s support. Very rarely, the SACP will be named by a respondent. One needs a very big sample, typically, to capture it.

“The biggest poll the SRF has ever done was in June 2022, a sample of 3 200 registered voters. In that poll, 0.3% of respondents identified the SACP as their party of choice. It is a negligible result, well within the margin of error. As close to zero as one gets. It has hardly ever featured since then and the SRF’s most recent poll in March 2026 captured no SACP voters.”

He went on to say, “The most obvious reason for this is that the SACP has not been a legitimate choice. It has not stood for national elections. Neither has Cosatu. So, the Tripartite Alliance has spent decades educating its voters, from all three components of the alliance, to vote ANC. The fundamental obstacle thus facing the SACP, is to undo decades of learnt behaviour among its supporters in a matter of some seven months. This alone will cost tens of millions in campaign costs and, even then, the short time frame makes it difficult to deliver that message effectively.

“Even if it does do this, there is a dual membership problem. Dual membership means dual loyalty, and there is simply no way the SACP – or anyone – can know how this will break. Will an ANC-SACP member, even if made fully aware that the SACP is on the ballot, vote ANC or SACP?

“Thus, the SACP’s membership numbers are not a helpful guide to its support levels either. The bottom line is this: SRF polls suggest there is a tiny market for the SACP, but it has never been tested properly – in other words, it has never been tested in an environment where SACP voters are aware the SACP is a legitimate choice.

“With time, money and the right message, the SACP could scrape together a small vote share, its full extent we do not know, but it is short on all three – it has no money, it has no time, and its message is confused.”

Wayne Sussman, a political analyst, concurred with Van Onselen, saying that he did not expect the SACP to perform well in the LGE. He thought their performance would be closer to the United Democratic Movement in 1999 (which won 3.4% in that year) than the Economic Freedom Fighters in 2014 (where the party won 6.4% of the vote).

Another obstacle for the SACP is that its values are increasingly being rejected by South Africans.

The shift in public opinion toward pragmatic economic policies is evident in recent polling. A significant portion of the electorate now supports policies that prioritise job creation over the kind of wealth redistribution championed by the SACP. Voters are increasingly calling for solutions that provide tangible outcomes rather than ideologically driven policies.

In 2022, more than 60% of people polled by the SRF said that growth and job creation were better ways to improve people’s lives than wealth redistribution.

In 2025, people were asked if South Africa needed a strong private sector to grow the economy, with nearly 90% of people saying this should be the case.

It is clear that most South Africans believe that economic growth, driven by the private sector, should be the primary way to address poverty, rather than state control and wealth redistribution, meaning that the market number of South Africans who will buy what the SACP is selling is small.

In addition, the available voting market for the SACP has to a large degree already been captured by the Economic Freedom Fighters and uMkhonto weSizwe.

In the final analysis, the SACP is likely to pick up a few municipal council seats around the country, but it is unlikely to make much of an impact. The moment for the party to have left its alliance with the ANC has passed, and it won’t come again.