Sources in the Democratic Alliance (DA) have told The Common Sense that an announcement on the political future of Helen Zille may be made within days.

Ms Zille has been the Chair of the DA’s Federal Council since 2019, a position that is up for election early next year. Speculation is that Ms Zille will, this weekend, be announced as the DA’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.

Frans Cronje told The Common Sense that “if that speculation is correct, then Ms Zille will occupy what will arguably be the most consequential political job in the country”.

South Africa goes to local government elections in late 2026 or early 2027. Those elections will come roughly 30 months after the African National Congress (ANC) surrendered its political majority in national elections held in 2024. The forthcoming local elections are seen as a strong directional indicator of the political future of that party.

In the 2024 election, the ANC secured roughly 40% of its votes from within the township voting market on South Africa’s urban fringes. This is seen as an aspirant middle-class market and critical to the ANC securing its political future in the country. The rural voting market, from which the ANC also drew roughly 40% of its voters, is ageing and suffers from net out-migration, and is therefore not seen as a sustainable avenue via which the party can secure its political future.

Should the ANC suffer significant losses in South Africa’s urban centres, the effect may put it in a position from which it is unable ever to recover. Johannesburg is the centrepiece of those markets.

Worryingly for the ANC, the city remains wracked with water and electricity outages. Potholes, unfilled trenches, broken traffic lights, and corrupt metro-police officers present daily gauntlets run by motorists. In real terms property prices have fallen. Against the backdrop of low economic growth rates and high joblessness rates, the Johannesburg deck is being stacked in a manner that is not to the advantage of the ANC.

Ms Zille has a reputation for being uncompromising, tough, and not afraid of controversy. A fear for ANC strategists is that it is exactly those attributes that might attract voters tired of water and electricity outages. According to Cronje, “the hierarchy of needs of voters in Johannesburg may be shifting to a point where voters don’t care what you say on X as long as you ensure there is water in the taps”.

Leaked polls suggest that ANC strategists are right to be concerned. After the 2000 local government election, the ANC held 59% of the seats in the council. That number peaked at 63% in 2006, before falling to 59% in 2011, 45% in 2016, and 34% in 2021. Polls suggest the party’s support in the city, which is not directly equivalent to seats held, has now slipped to below 30%.

The DA, however, faces an uphill battle to win the city. It held 39% of seats in the city in 2016, which fell to 26% in 2021 after Action South Africa (ASA) contested that election, winning 44 seats. The relationship between those two parties is likely irreconcilable, with ASA having routinely sought to sabotage DA governance efforts in both Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Given past experiences, the DA’s coalition options with non-ANC opposition parties may therefore be limited in the event that it does not win an outright or near outright majority in the city and in theory the party may more successfully govern the city in coalition with the ANC than with its opposition peers. That option is, however, complicated by the fact that the leadership of the ANC in Gauteng has rebelled against the national ANC/DA coalition government entered into by Luthuli House.

Should a Zille campaign, if indeed she is to be announced as the party’s mayoral candidate, be unable to exceed the party’s 2016 showing, win back votes lost to ASA, and swing a number of disillusioned ANC voters, or the ANC be unable to bring its Gauteng rebels to heel, the city may be headed for an extended period of political deadlock. However, there is broad consensus that the city has been so poorly run that it would be a simple matter to stage a recovery in the event that the political maths delivers a reformist city administration.