When respondents were asked which political party they most strongly associate with the phrase “makes broken promises”, 75% chose the African National Congress (ANC). That placed the party far ahead of every rival and made it the dominant political brand attached to voter disappointment and mistrust.

By contrast, just 6% said the phrase describes the Democratic Alliance (DA) best. Only 1% chose the uMkhonto weSizwe Party. No measurable share associated the phrase most strongly with ActionSA, the Economic Freedom Fighters, the Freedom Front Plus, the Inkatha Freedom Party, or the Patriotic Alliance. Meanwhile, 16% said the label applies to all of the parties, and 2% were undecided.

Among black voters, 74% most strongly associated the ANC with the phrase “broken promises”. For coloured voters, the figure was 96%, for Indian voters 64%, and for white voters also 96%.

The ANC-led city government in Johannesburg has repeatedly promised to improve water and electricity supply and repair broken infrastructure, yet much of the city remains marked by outages, decay, and unreliable delivery.

The poll finding is politically damaging for the ANC because it goes beyond dissatisfaction with service delivery or anger over local conditions. It suggests that for many Johannesburg voters, the party is now identified not simply with poor performance, but increasingly with an inability to do anything about it.

Polls previously published by The Common Sense show that the DA is leading the ANC in the city. Those polls also showed that, while a majority of city voters thought their lives would improve if the DA won the city, under 40% of voters were willing to vote for that to occur.

In an own goal of sorts the DA’s prospects to win the city have been further dimmed after the party recently elected Luyolo Mphithi as the chairman of its Johannesburg region. Mphithi was a central figure to the Schweizer-Reneke fake racism scandal which was engineered by the DA ahead of the 2019 election in an effort to bolster its standing with black voters. The incident saw Mphiti and the DA falsely accuse primary school teacher Elena Barkhuizen of racism and of segregating her classroom. At the time the DA had a strategy to play-up incidents of fake racism in the hope that this would draw black voters. Barkhuizen, who endured great trauma, was later cleared and the DA allegations exposed as fake news. Key instigators of that incident later left the party but Mphithi continued to be promoted up the party ranks.

*The Social Research Foundation Q1 2026 Market Survey was commissioned by the Social Research Foundation supported by The Common Sense and conducted by Victory Research using a nationally representative telephonic CATI survey of registered voters (N=2,222), with metro samples upsized to over 500 respondents each in Johannesburg (n=503), Tshwane (n=510), and eThekwini (n=503). Fieldwork was conducted between 16 February 2026 and 6 March 2026 using a single-frame random digit dialling sampling design that draws from all possible South African mobile numbers, ensuring equal probability of selection and near-universal coverage given SIM penetration above 250%, more than 90% adult phone ownership, and mobile network coverage of 99.8% of the population. Respondents were screened to include registered voters only, and turnout modelling assigned each respondent a probability of voting based on likelihood indicators, with the primary model assuming turnout of 56.0%. Data were weighted to ensure the national sample reflects the demographic profile of the registered voter population across language, age, race, gender, location (urban/rural), education, and income, while metro samples were weighted to the demographic composition of voters in each metro. Results are reported at a 95% confidence level with a design effect (DEFF) of 1.762, producing margins of error of 2.1% nationally and 4.4% for each metro sample.