About a third of South Africa's councils were hung in 2021. More are expected in 2026
A Unisa political scientist argues that coalition government is becoming South Africa's political transition, and that voters will punish the parties they blame for instability.
About a third of South Africa’s 257 local governments had no majority party after the 2021 local government elections, and the expectation is that the 2026 vote will produce more hung councils still.
That is the central claim in an analysis published by IOL on 9 October, written by a political scientist based at the Department of Political Sciences at Unisa. The piece is a forward look at coalition government ahead of the 2026 local elections, and it makes an argument South African voters will recognise from the last decade of municipal politics.
The arithmetic it sets out is simple. In 2021, roughly one in three councils had to be run through some form of coalition arrangement. Two thirds carried on under a single majority party. The perception that coalitions dominate local government, the analysis says, is not correct. But the direction of travel is clear. Coalition arrangements have been spreading, and in 2024 they reached two provincial governments, in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, as well as the national sphere.
For a reader trying to work out what this means, the practical question is what happens in the council chamber after the votes are counted. South African law gives each municipality one of three executive systems, set out in sections 8 to 10 of the Local Government: Municipal Structures Act. A municipality can run an executive mayoral system, a collective executive system, or a plenary executive system. The provincial government, not the local council, chooses which one applies.
That choice has direct consequences for how disruptive a coalition will be. Under an executive mayoral system, a motion of no confidence in the mayor removes the mayor and the entire mayoral committee, up to ten members. Under a collective executive system, which many large towns use, the same motion removes only the mayor, because the executive committee members were elected in their own right by the council rather than appointed by the mayor. The second arrangement is the less disruptive one, and it is the one the analysis flags as the more stable option for a multiparty council.
Parliament has been working on a further set of rules. An amendment to the Municipal Structures Act, often called the Coalition Bill, has been before the legislature for some time. Its main provisions, as the analysis describes them, are to formalise a negotiated coalition agreement and make it binding on all the parties that sign it, to reduce the number of no-confidence motions allowed in a year, to extend the period for negotiating a coalition after an election, and to establish a minimum threshold that small parties must meet to be represented on a council.
The analysis is careful about what such a law can achieve. It says the bill is not a magic wand that will remedy every problem of coalition government, but that it would establish a central authority as a countermeasure against political manoeuvring inside coalitions. It also notes real uncertainty about timing. Whether the new rules will be ready before the 2026 election, it says, is very uncertain.
On the public mood, the analysis is blunt. South Africans are generally sceptical of coalition arrangements, it says, but at the same time they are not voting for a new alternative majority party. That leaves coalitions as the default option. The dilemma it identifies is that voters want change at the local level while disliking the coalition governments that change keeps producing, and it judges the likelihood of a return to single-party majority government in the metros to be very slim.
Where the analysis pushes back against the scepticism is on what coalitions can do when they work. It argues that coalition government is a transitional phase for a country that spent about 30 years under a single dominant party, comparable in that respect to Japan, Botswana until 2024, and earlier Sweden and India. It says no party currently has a prospect of forming a government on its own, and that coalition government is therefore the only option for the foreseeable future. Collectively, it argues, coalitions include a wider political spectrum and more interests than a single party can carry, and that inclusivity is a strength in democratic theory. Power-sharing of that kind, it suggests, is also an antidote to identity politics, because parties built around identity find it harder to pursue their agendas inside an inclusive arrangement.
The condition attached to all of this is cooperation. The analysis is explicit that coalitions work only when parties accept that they have to work together for a common purpose, and that when coalitions serve party or personal benefit they remain unstable. Its proposed answer is not only better rules but a political culture that punishes opportunism, and it puts a specific consequence on the table. The 2026 local elections, it says, give voters a chance to retaliate against the parties they hold responsible for instability and the collapse of coalitions, particularly the very small kingmaker parties. It adds that the 2029 national elections will be the last opportunity for those parties to change course.
For South African readers, the near-term question is not whether coalitions are coming. On the evidence set out here, they already are. The question is whether the rules now before Parliament arrive in time, which executive system each province chooses for each municipality, and whether the parties that have to share power decide to make it work. The voters get their say first.
Source: IOL, Navigating local government coalitions a litmus test for political parties
