Ekurhuleni poll puts DA on 31.2% and ANC on 29.4% as coalition question looms
A new poll of the country's fourth most populous metro shows no party close to a majority, leaving the coalition arithmetic as the contest to watch.
Ekurhuleni, the fourth most populous metropolitan area in the country, has more voters than several metros South Africans habitually talk about more, and a new poll puts the DA narrowly ahead of the ANC there with no party anywhere near a majority.
In the poll discussed by eNCA (YouTube), the DA sits at 31.2% and the ANC at 29.4%. The gap between the two is under two percentage points.
The rest of the field is spread thin. The uMkhonto weSizwe Party is on 11.5%, the EFF on 9.2%, ActionSA on 6.1%, the Freedom Front Plus on 5.2%, the IFP on 2.8% and the Patriotic Alliance on 2.5%.
On those numbers the largest party in the metro would hold less than a third of the vote, which is what pushes the coalition question to the front of the contest.
The metro’s political weight is not in doubt. In 2019, the ANC was hovering below the 50% mark in Gauteng as the final results came in, and it was Ekurhuleni that carried the party over the line in the province, according to the eNCA discussion. Five years later the picture had changed, with the emergence of a new party reshaping where support went.
Language and geography help explain the shift. Zulu is spoken more in Ekurhuleni than in Johannesburg, and proportionally more as well. The metro is where the MK Party performed best among metropolitan areas outside KwaZulu-Natal, which the broadcast identified as one of the reasons for the ANC’s weaker showing there in 2024.
The poll is a snapshot rather than a result. Its finding, on its own numbers, is that Ekurhuleni is heading into a contest where the biggest party will need partners, and where the identity of those partners is the open question.
Source: eNCA (YouTube), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz6RsvF0Rck
