South Africa’s long-governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), performed disastrously in the country’s May 2024 elections. Its electoral fortunes are now tied to regaining support in Gauteng, the most populous and economically important province, which it had governed with outright majorities since 1994. In 2024 the ANC’s Gauteng result of 34.8%, along with its 17% in KwaZulu-Natal, sealed the party’s loss of its national outright majority.
We asked political scientist Susan Booysen for her perspective on the ANC’s battle for Tshwane, a metropolitan municipality in Gauteng. It’s also the administrative seat of the national government, where the party used a newly constituted coalition to topple the Democratic Alliance mayor, Cilliers Brink.
