ANC takes three councils as PA turns 4.41% of votes into 26 seats

The ANC became the first party to take control of municipalities in the 2026 local government elections, holding three councils and leading in eight more with 15% of votes counted on Thursday morning, according to the Electoral Commission’s results dashboard.

The ANC had 120 council seats at that point, the DA 81 and the Patriotic Alliance 26. The PA also led in one council, making it the only party besides the ANC to register a council lead. The DA, despite running the ANC almost level in the national vote, had not taken control of a single council.

As Sunday World reported on 5 November, the ANC stood on 31.76% of valid votes against the DA’s 31.23%, a gap of 0.53 percentage points. The ANC’s seat advantage was 39. That gap between vote share and seats is the number that matters in a municipal election, because councils are won municipality by municipality and not on a national tally. A party that piles up votes in a few dense metros can finish second nationally and still control nothing, while a party with support spread thinly across many small councils can convert a modest share into seats and, in hung councils, into the mayoral chain.

That is where the PA’s morning went. The party had 26 seats on 4.41% of the national vote, placing it third in the seat rankings while standing sixth in the vote standings. The MK Party, third nationally on 5.13%, had four seats. The EFF, on 4.94%, had six. The Freedom Front Plus, on 4.46%, had five. ActionSA had three seats on 2.34%, the IFP two on 2.32%, and the PMC two on just 0.26%. The SACP, contesting separately from the ANC, had one seat on 2.56%. ICOSA and independent candidates had one seat each.

Set against the completed 2021 municipal results, the early 2026 percentages show the ANC well down on the roughly 45.6% it finished with five years ago, the DA up from about 21.7% and the PA up from about 1%. The EFF’s early share, on these figures, is less than half the 10.3% it recorded in 2021.

None of that is a result yet. With 85% of the count outstanding, results from municipalities with different political allegiances can still move the national percentages and the seat rankings substantially, and the IEC dashboard is a running count rather than a projection. The councils that decide who runs the water, the electricity connections, the refuse collection and the local roads for the next five years are still being counted.

What the first 15% does show is the shape of the contest South Africans will wake up to: an ANC and a DA separated by half a percentage point in the national vote but by 39 seats and three councils in the room where it counts, and a PA that has turned a small national share into a seat bloc large enough to matter in the hung councils that are likely to follow.