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When South Africans see the results of the 2026 local elections, they may be surprised to learn that the parties that won the elections in their municipalities are not the ones in charge of the municipality. This is called the overhang problem, and South Africa is about to come face to face with it.

In South African municipal elections, voters get more than one vote. The first is for a ward councillor, with the candidate who gets the most votes in each ward winning that seat. The second is for a political party, and these votes are used to allocate proportional representation, or PR, seats so that the final council broadly reflects each party's overall level of support.

Imagine a municipal council with only 10 seats. Five are ward seats and five are PR seats.

Now imagine that one party wins all five wards, but gets only 25% of the vote in each one. That is possible because a candidate does not need more than 50% to win a ward. They simply need more votes than any other candidate. With South African politics now becoming highly fragmented, a party could therefore win a ward with only 25% while several other parties divide the remaining 75% between them.

Suppose that same party also gets only 25% of the PR vote. Its overall support is therefore around a quarter of the vote, but it has already won all five ward seats.

Those ward councillors cannot be taken away. The party therefore keeps five of the council's 10 seats, giving it 50% of the seats despite winning only around 25% of the vote.

The other parties, which together won around 75% of the vote, would have to share the five seats that remain.

This produces the strange result that another party could win around 50% of the overall vote but, if it won none of the wards, end up with only two or three of the council's 10 seats after the remaining seats are allocated. Meanwhile, the party with only 25% support would hold five seats because it had already won all five wards.

Marius Roodt told The Common Sense, “This may happen in a number of municipalities after November. And there is very little awareness of the problem and no clear fix given that rules that would have allowed officials to expand the number of PR seats to address the problem have been scrapped. You will therefore sit with a situation where a party cannot agree on who is actually in charge of a municipality and this conflict will play out during the same period that scores of coalition agreements have to be struck.”

According to Roodt, “The most likely solution lies in the Constitutional Court, which will have to find that the number of PR seats must be expanded to ensure that a party holds a number of seats corresponding to its share of the vote. This is actually what the Constitution prescribes.”

But, “in the time it takes to make that finding, or if the court thinks differently, local government politics will be even more chaotic and fractious than normal and the stresses will play all the way up into the Government of National Unity,” Roodt warned.

He said this has happened before, but in very minor cases. “In 2021, in Kai !Garib [Kakamas] in the Northern Cape, the municipal council had 19 seats – 10 ward seats and nine PR seats. The ANC won all 10 ward seats but only 44% of the overall vote, meaning that it had 53% of the overall seats.”

Roodt says, “Obviously, if that happens in a serious place such as Johannesburg, with a budget of billions of rand, the implications on South Africa’s national politics will be much greater.”