IFP turned local coalition seats into 30 mayoralties, Mistra barometer finds

The IFP took the mayoralty in every one of the 30 municipal administrations where it was the largest party, according to the Mistra Coalitions Barometer, a dataset tracking coalition behaviour across 80 municipalities since the 2021 local government elections.

As TimesLIVE reported on 8 October, the barometer found the IFP held seats in 31 of those 80 municipalities, 24 of them in KwaZulu-Natal, where it held seats in every hung council. It sat in 70 administrations and was a member of government in 40. Measured by time in office, it sat in government for half the days on which it held seats in a hung council.

That conversion rate is the striking number. The party led 30 of the 40 administrations it belonged to, and every one of those 30 was a government it anchored. Those IFP-led administrations governed for a combined 17,775 days.

The barometer describes the party as a regional specialist, and the geography supports the label. Its strength is concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, where hung councils have been the norm since 2021 and where the IFP has been a fixture of provincial politics for decades. Its most common governing partners were the EFF, with 5,516 shared days, the DA with 5,027 and ActionSA with 4,000.

The DA also backed 14 of the 30 IFP-led governments from outside the coalitions, across nine municipalities. The barometer calls this by far the largest member-supporter relationship in its dataset, meaning the DA propped up IFP-led councils without joining them.

For residents of those municipalities, the practical effect is a council that can pass a budget, appoint a municipal manager and keep services running. A hung council that cannot assemble a majority stalls on exactly those decisions, and the barometer’s day counts are a measure of how long each arrangement survived.

The EFF’s record reads differently. It held seats in 135 administrations, more than any party except the ANC and DA, but led only two. The barometer describes a wide presence combined with a paradoxical lack of executive leadership, and calls that combination the party’s defining structural feature. Where the EFF did enter government, it generally did so as a junior partner in another party’s coalition rather than leading it. Its largest partner was the ANC, with 12,638 shared days.

The MK Party is recorded as the unknown quantity. By the data cut-off it had councillors in only three administrations, uMzumbe, Thabazimbi and Mandeni, all won through by-elections, and was coded as opposition in all three. The barometer says that record does not provide enough data to draw reasonable inferences about the party’s preferred coalition partners, its willingness to enter government or its broader political strategy.

The dataset also makes plain how fragmented local politics has become. It records 103 different parties holding at least one seat, of which 64 became coalition members and 14 anchored a government. The barometer notes that local parties, residents’ associations and one-councillor formations are often the decisive actors in determining which of the larger parties’ coalitions are able to govern and survive.

That is the part of the finding with the widest reach. In a hung council, a party with two or three seats can decide who becomes mayor and whether a coalition lasts a full term. The barometer’s day counts give that leverage a number.

The barometer is a Mistra project. Its figures cover the 80 municipalities in its dataset and run to a stated data cut-off, so the MK Party’s three administrations reflect the position at that point rather than the current one.

Source: TimesLIVE, IFP has mastered coalition politics as EFF wields influence without executive power: Mistra