DA holds Cape Town on 55.90% as CSIR projections put it ahead in Johannesburg and Tshwane

Cape Town is projected to stay with the DA on 55.90%, and the same early modelling puts the party ahead in Johannesburg on 33.94% and in Tshwane on 31.77%, according to the first projections from the CSIR’s election model.

The projections, published on 5 November 2026, are the first city-by-city read on where the 2026 local election is heading before every voting district has declared. They are not a final result. They are a statistical estimate of where the count is going, and they will move as more districts report.

In the Eastern Cape, the model puts the DA on 40.97% in Nelson Mandela Bay. In Ekurhuleni, the party is projected at 29.48%. In eThekwini, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party is projected on 32.53%. Buffalo City and Mangaung are projected to go to the ANC, which the model places in front in both metros.

For the reader in any of those cities, the numbers are the first indication of who is likely to run the council that sets rates, water and electricity tariffs, waste collection, informal trading rules and the local police oversight that shapes daily life. A party that holds a metro controls the budget that decides which streets are tarred, which clinics get maintained and how long a resident waits for a title deed. Those are the decisions the vote was about.

The CSIR’s model is not an opinion poll and it is not an official result. Dr Jabu Mtsweni, who heads the CSIR’s NextGen Enterprises and Institutions unit, said the projections are independent statistical estimates drawn from the results declared up to a given moment in the count. The CSIR has run the model on South African election data for more than two decades, and it says the method has been applied to the country’s national and municipal contests since 1999.

The method works from two things. It looks at how South Africans have voted in the past, and it models how results arrive from voting districts as counting proceeds. It then clusters districts that behave alike and uses those clusters to estimate the outcome in districts that have not yet declared. The CSIR says the projections tighten as more results land, and that they converge on the final outcome as the count runs to its end.

That matters for how the numbers should be read. A projection at this stage is a snapshot, not a verdict. A metro projected narrowly can change hands as the remaining districts report. The CSIR’s own framing is that the estimates become more precise as the count advances.

Mtsweni said the model shows how scientific work can be put to a matter of national importance, and that it gives the public a timely, evidence-based read on the count as results come in. He was clear that the figures are estimates and not the official outcome.

The projections land in a country where local government is the layer of the state closest to people’s lives, and where the question of who controls a metro is a question about service delivery, jobs and the local economy. In Cape Town, a 55.90% projection for the DA points to a party holding the city with room to spare. In Johannesburg and Tshwane, the projected leads are narrower, and the final shape of those councils will depend on the districts still to report.

The Enquirer will keep reporting the projections as the CSIR updates them and will set them against the official results as those are declared, so that readers in each metro can see where the estimate held and where the count moved.

Source: MyBroadband, 2026 South African Election Results: First projections for Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town are in