THIS REPORT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED FOR THE ELECTORAL INSTITUTE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA (EISA) SOUTH AFRICA ELECTION UPDATE 2016
There has been much debate about the extent of, and the reasons for, the ANC’s ‘bad result’ in the ‘game-changing’ August 2016 local government election. This article takes a different angle in evaluating the result from an ANC perspective, and reaches a distinctive conclusion: that even allowing for regional and local specificity and differences, there is ample evidence to rebut the original, pre-election supposition, as well as some post-election analysis, that the ANC decline was largely limited to ‘cosmopolitan’, larger metro areas when, in fact, while maybe not universal or evenly spread, ANC decline was significant even in places where it has traditionally been dominant. In turn, this suggests that an ANC majority in 2019 is no longer a foregone conclusion.