The stakes could hardly be higher for Johannesburg as the city heads towards the next local government elections, likely to be held in late 2026 or early 2027. For the first time in post-apartheid South Africa credible polling places the ANC at risk of slipping from being the largest political party in South Africa’s largest city.

According to recent DA-commissioned research, support for the ANC in Johannesburg has collapsed to below 20%, while the DA is polling at 38 percent, and this is well before what is likely to be a high-profile campaign, led by Helen Zille, has even begun in earnest.

And this dramatic shift is more than just a statistical quirk. It is a direct consequence of years of deteriorating service delivery, rampant cost-of-living pressures, and an electorate that has grown weary of unfulfilled promises and administrative mismanagement.

Analysts point out that the erosion of the ANC’s urban support is not the result of coalition politics at the national level, but a local story of daily frustrations and declining municipal performance. Voters in Johannesburg, a city where economic opportunity and efficient government once seemed plausible, now confront load-shedding, water cuts, broken roads, and a municipality that struggles to keep the lights on, literally and figuratively.

Within Luthuli House, there is no effort to sugarcoat the challenge. Even insiders admit that the ANC could fall as low as 12 percent in Johannesburg, a humiliation rooted in the party’s refusal to heed national advice on coalition-building and its failure to offer a compelling vision to urban voters.

At the same time the ANC has lost wards across the country in by-elections since the local government elections, underscoring the depth of its decline.

If these trends hold, Johannesburg could soon become a showcase for the DA, with Zille at the helm, and perhaps signal the rise of a new political order in South Africa’s cities. It is not difficult to determine the costs of inaction by the ANC: unless the party re-engages its urban base and delivers visible results, it risks ceding the country’s economic and political engine room for a generation. For Johannesburg, the next election may be the moment that marks not only the ANC’s fall from grace, but the arrival of a new, competitive era in South African urban governance.