In the 1994 national election, the African National Congress (ANC) won 12.2 million votes, representing approximately 54.0% of the voting-age population. By 2024, that figure had fallen to 6.4 million votes, equivalent to roughly 15.0% of voters. On Wednesday, it could fall to approximately 10.0%. Think about what that means. A party that once commanded the active electoral support of more than half the country’s eligible voters may soon command the support of barely one in ten. That is the scale of the political transformation now under way in South Africa, and it is considerably more profound than the percentages that will appear on election night.

There has been considerable attention given to opinion polling ahead of this election, but even the best polling has limitations, particularly in local government elections, where turnout is difficult to predict and margins of error in individual metropolitan areas can be as high as six percentage points. There is, however, another way to anticipate Wednesday’s outcome, and that is to examine the actual votes cast in previous elections.

The chart below shows that the ANC won 12.2 million votes in the 1994 national elections, 10.6 million in 1999, 10.9 million in 2004, 11.7 million votes in the 2009 national election, 11.4 million in 2014, 10 million in 2019, but just 6.4 million in 2024. The decline is even more remarkable when measured against an adult population that has grown substantially over the same period and is also shown on the chart – a percentage that has fallen from 54% in 1994 to just 15.3% in 2024.

Tomorrow, that number may fall below 10%.

The ANC has consistently performed considerably worse in local government elections than in the preceding national elections. Its 11.4 million votes in 2014 fell to 8.1 million in the 2016 local election, while the 10 million votes it won in 2019 collapsed to just 5.4 million in 2021 local election. Apply that same relationship to the 6.5 million votes it won nationally in 2024, and the ANC could receive approximately 3.5 million votes on Wednesday – out of an adult population of more than 40 million. The chart below sets out this data and shows the share of the adult population that voted for the ANC in national and local elections since 2014.

There is another way to arrive at a similar estimate. The ANC's 5.4 million votes in the 2021 local election were won before the emergence of Jacob Zuma's uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), which attracted 2.3 million votes in 2024. If MKP turns out even half of those voters on Wednesday, and those votes are treated as having come from the ANC’s former constituency, the ANC would be left with approximately 4.2 million votes. A somewhat stronger MKP turnout could push that number below four million. Both approaches therefore suggest that the ANC will win somewhere between 3.5 million and four million votes, or roughly 10% of the adult population.

That really is a most important story of what will happen tomorrow. The great party of liberation, that once bestrode South Africa as a colossus, laid low to where just one in ten of the country’s adult residents will get up and cast their vote for it.

Wilkinson is a lawyer and a chartered accountant. He previously worked as a legal adviser to Tania Campbell, the former mayor of Ekurhuleni, and to Cilliers Brink, the former mayor of Tshwane.