What the ANC’s Terminal Decline Means for the Future of South Africa
The latest polling from the Social Research Foundation and The Common Sense suggests that the ANC is in terminal decline and that South Africa’s political fragmentation is deepening.
And as long as those results remain an economic growth rate of near 1%, the consequence will be that South Africa breaks up into the third of the three scenarios sketched by this newspaper in its recent South Africa in 2034: The Latest Scenarios report.
The ANC has fallen to 34.0% nationally, down from nearer 40.0% earlier this year and only two percentage points above its post-2025 VAT-crisis low. The DA remains broadly stable on 27.0%, the MKP has risen to 15.0%, while the EFF remains flat on 7.0%.
As a consequence, the vast lifts in living standards and the doubling of people in employment that South Africa saw in its first 15 or so years after 1994, and the consequences of which were seen in that 2004 election number, have been reversed.
On top of that, the latest data suggest that the ANC has now additionally become trapped between two issues, which are serving as accelerants for that decline.
The first is Phala Phala.
Even among ANC voters, significantly more, 37%, believe he is guilty than the percentage who believe he is innocent, 29%. Around 80.0% of South Africans believe that, if found guilty either by Parliament or a court, he should be removed from office.
To the extent that this is true, it is proving effective in accelerating the ANC’s decline.
The major metro data show the extent of that.
In Johannesburg and eThekwini, the ANC is polling below or at 20%. In Tshwane it is just above 30%.
The implication is that South Africa continues to move deeper into a fragmented political era in which no single party appears capable of exercising control over the state or the government.
Advocates for the ANC/DA coalition will argue that the latest data show the importance of consolidating that agreement – even though the poll data show that in practice this has done little to hold, let alone lift, political support for the joint DA/ANC relative to the collective tally those parties won in May 2024.