The invisible kingmakers: Why Gauteng’s minority parties will decide municipal elections - News24

As South Africa heads to the polls, the parties dominating media coverage may not be the ones who will determine who governs Gauteng’s three metros.

Several pre-election polls and several researchers indicated that no political party would secure an outright majority to govern any of the three Gauteng metros.

While the ANC, DA, EFF, IFP and MK Party command headlines, the formations receiving just about 2% of election coverage – Rise Mzansi, Build One South Africa, Al Jama-ah, the Patriotic Alliance (PA) and ActionSA – will likely emerge as the true power brokers in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni.

The mathematics of coalition politics have transformed these minority parties from electoral footnotes to kingmakers whose backroom negotiations will determine governance outcomes in municipalities where no party secures a clear majority.

“We will probably have new coalition governments in most of the metropolitan municipalities after the elections, with numerous local and district councils also expected to be governed through coalition arrangements,” Mari Harris, a political analyst at Ipsos South Africa, predicted in October.

Jonathan Moakes, the director of the SABI Strategy Group, was more blunt about what voters should expect.

“We’ve had a multitude of polls over the past month that have indicated that particularly in metros, such as Johannesburg, Tshwane, and possibly even Ekurhuleni, no party is going to get a majority.”

The past five years indicate what will unfold after Wednesday.

Between the 2021 local government elections and February 2026, 80 of South Africa’s 213 municipal councils became hung at some point – 37.6% of all directly elected councils, according to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra) coalitions barometer.

In Gauteng specifically, eight of nine municipalities emerged from the 2021 elections without outright majorities.

That fragmentation handed extraordinary leverage to parties with minimal representation.

Al Jama-ah, holding just three seats in Johannesburg’s 270-member council, secured the mayorship when Kabelo Gwamanda took office.

His removal in August 2024 underscored the volatility of power, but also the centrality of minority parties to governance outcomes.

The PA, with eight Johannesburg seats, parlayed its seemingly negligible representation into maximum influence.

Party leader Gayton McKenzie’s explicit demands during June 2024 coalition negotiations set the tone.

“We don’t want finance, we want home affairs,” he told SABC News on 1 June 2024.

Despite winning just 2.03% of Gauteng’s provincial vote (two seats out of 80), the PA secured an executive position when Sheila Mary Peters was appointed MEC for environment in Premier Panyaza Lesufi’s July 2024 cabinet.

ActionSA’s trajectory proves equally instructive. The party’s 44 Johannesburg seats – just 16.3% of the council – allowed Herman Mashaba to dictate conditions for supporting any new administration.

“It is not a coalition arrangement. ActionSA will not enter the executive to co-govern; no coalition agreement will be signed,” Mashaba said on 22 July 2024, yet his three non-negotiable demands shaped the government that emerged.

In Tshwane, ActionSA’s 19 seats (8.9% of the 214-seat council) proved decisive in October 2024 when Nasiphi Moya secured the mayoral office through an alliance with the ANC, EFF and smaller parties.

Rise Mzansi exemplifies how new parties can convert minimal electoral presence into governance roles.

A single Gauteng provincial seat – 1.25% of the legislature – translated into a provincial executive position when Vuyiswa Ramokgopa was appointed MEC for agriculture and rural development.

Once voting stations close, the real negotiations will begin.

The Electoral Commission of South Africa has seven days to count, audit results and formally declare the election. That declaration triggers a tight 14-day deadline to establish councils.

“The 14-day window and coalition formation” creates what analysts describe as a pressure-cooker environment where minority parties can extract maximum concessions from larger formations desperate to avoid provincial intervention or fresh elections.

Where no party holds outright majorities, those 14 days will see intense bargaining over mayoral positions, executive portfolios and policy direction.

Based on 2021 patterns, smaller parties will again find themselves courted by multiple suitors, able to demand executive positions, budget allocations and policy commitments disproportionate to their electoral mandates.

However, the ANC coalition document suggested that any political party which gets a majority in a municipality should lead the government in that municipality.

Yet voters would have seen remarkably little of these critical actors.

The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa’s (EISA) 2024 media monitoring report found that “the ANC received the majority share of election media coverage at 33%, the DA 14%, the EFF 9%, and Rise Mzansi just 2%”.

The report acknowledged that “smaller parties and new parties, particularly under-resourced ones, may feel justly aggrieved by the lack of coverage afforded to them”.

EISA’s media review found that “out of 52 political parties that contested the [national] elections [in 2024], 10 political parties made up 92% of all sources, while the remaining 42 parties and independents accounted for just 8% of the voice share”.

The Press Council of South Africa said in February 2025 that “community media did not sufficiently provide equitable election coverage to all political parties and independents, limiting their opportunity to share their mandates and manifestos”.

This coverage gap creates an information asymmetry ahead of Wednesday’s election: voters would have seen extensive coverage of the ANC, DA and EFF, yet the parties that ultimately determine governance outcomes operate largely outside media spotlights.

What voters can expect after the elections, based on the 2021 to 2026 track record, is governance instability. By February 2026, 74 of South Africa’s municipal councils were operating under coalition or minority governments, according to Mistra’s data.

The median administration lifespan was 651 days, or approximately 21 months. Half of all coalition administrations tracked since 2021 had collapsed by that point.

Johannesburg has cycled through multiple mayors since 2016. Tshwane has experienced at least six mayoral changes through a number of motions of no confidence.

Zweli Mkhize, the chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance, cited these upheavals as evidence that “mayors were voted out several times in one five-year term, highlighting the need for a solid framework for managing coalitions to avoid political wrangling and instability”.

Harris warned that “several coalition arrangements formed after the 2021 local government elections could be described as marriages of convenience”.

The SA Institute of International Affairs identified the pattern in its March 2026 research thus: “Provincial and municipal coalitions show the highest instability, driven by shifting alliances, leadership turnover and outsized leverage of small kingmaker parties.”

Professors Susan Booysen and Jaap de Visser, in their December 2023 “Coalitions Framework for South Africa” commissioned by the Presidency, noted that coalition experiences “have been depicted largely in terms of problematic instability that detracted from constructive, developmental governance”.

This legislative vacuum creates space for the post-election negotiations, in which minority parties can extract concessions disproportionate to their mandates.

EISA cautioned that South Africa’s electoral system “has unintentionally empowered parties with smaller support bases to act as kingmakers, potentially giving them disproportionate power”.

The institute documented how “when smaller political parties pull out of the coalition arrangement, they can force motions of no confidence that collapse the incumbent government”.

Moakes assessed the likely post-election scenario bluntly: “Unfortunately, they tend to be about positions rather than a programme of action. Coalition agreements can work, but they need agreements. They need to be binding.”

Legislative reform intended to bring stability to coalition governance will have no bearing on the elections.

The so-called Coalitions Bill tabled this year seeks to mandate written coalition agreements and extend council-formation periods from 14 to 30 days.

It does not establish minimum electoral thresholds for representation.

A threshold provision would have excluded parties winning less than 1% of the vote from council representation, directly targeting the smallest kingmakers.

That means the same informal, often unstable coalition dynamics that characterised 2021 to 2026 will again determine governance outcomes.

Paul Berkowitz, the director of Hlaziya Solutions, noted that “overall, about 80% of respondents say they would be happy to see a coalition of political parties in their municipality. It is more of a recognition of a reality – that coalition governments are here to stay”.

About 105 of South Africa’s 205 municipalities currently operate under outright ANC majorities, a number steadily declining.

The 66 hung councils confirmed after 2021 represented more than double the 2016 figure.

The parties receiving 2% of media coverage may determine 100% of governance outcomes.

In Johannesburg, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, the next 14 days will reveal which minority formations emerge as kingmakers, what concessions they extract, and whether the resulting coalitions prove more stable than their predecessors.

The negotiations conducted in this fortnight – conducted largely beyond public scrutiny by parties most voters know little about – will determine who actually governs Gauteng’s metros for the next five years.

News24 surveyed 5,001 registered voters to reveal who leads, what voters want fixed, and which coalitions South Africans could support.

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