For a party that once commanded the active support of more than half the country’s eligible voters, the arithmetic now points to a threshold that would once have been unthinkable. On Wednesday, the African National Congress could receive the backing of roughly 10 percent of South Africa’s adult population, according to an analysis by Richard Wilkinson, a lawyer and chartered accountant who previously served as a legal advisor to Tania Campbell, the former mayor of Ekurhuleni, and to Cilliers Brink, the former mayor of Tshwane.
The method behind that projection is straightforward. Rather than relying on opinion polling, which carries particular uncertainty in local government elections, Wilkinson examines the actual votes cast in previous contests. Polling has dominated attention ahead of the election, but even the best surveys have limits where turnout is difficult to predict and margins of error in individual metropolitan areas can reach six percentage points. The voting record offers a firmer basis for anticipating the outcome.
The historical numbers chart a long decline. The ANC won 12.2 million votes in the 1994 national election, representing approximately 54.0 percent of the voting-age population. It took 10.6 million in 1999, 10.9 million in 2004, 11.7 million in 2009, 11.4 million in 2014 and 10 million in 2019. In 2024 the figure fell to 6.4 million, or roughly 15.0 percent of voters. The drop is starker still when measured against an adult population that has grown substantially over the same period, with the share falling from 54 percent in 1994 to 15.3 percent in 2024.
Local government elections, the contest at stake on Wednesday, show an even sharper erosion. The ANC has consistently performed considerably worse in municipal races than in the preceding national ones. Its 11.4 million votes in 2014 fell to 8.1 million in the 2016 local election, while the 10 million it won in 2019 collapsed to just 5.4 million in the 2021 local election. Apply that same relationship to the 6.5 million votes it won nationally in 2024, and the ANC could receive approximately 3.5 million votes on Wednesday, out of an adult population of more than 40 million.
A second route arrives at a similar estimate. The ANC’s 5.4 million votes in 2021 were won before the emergence of Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), which attracted 2.3 million votes in 2024. If MKP turns out even half of those voters on Wednesday, and those votes are treated as having come from the ANC’s former constituency, the ANC would be left with approximately 4.2 million votes. A somewhat stronger MKP turnout could push that number below four million.
Both approaches therefore suggest the ANC will win somewhere between 3.5 million and four million votes, or roughly 10 percent of the adult population. In Wilkinson’s framing, that is the most important story of what will happen tomorrow: the great party of liberation, which once bestrode South Africa as a colossus, laid low to where just 1 in 10 of the country’s adult residents will get up and cast their vote for it.
Whether the projection holds will become clear when the ballots are counted. The underlying trend, visible across three decades of voting data, points in one direction, and Wednesday is likely to mark another step along it.