For voters in Durban’s townships and suburbs, Jacob Zuma’s absence from the campaign trail has become something they can feel in the numbers. The uMkhonto Wesizwe party’s support in eThekwini has slipped by eight percentage points, falling to 47% from 55%, according to the latest Ipsos poll released on Friday, 30 October, compared with the first-wave Ipsos survey earlier this year. Its leader has been out of sight since early October. The people who once filled his rallies are now being asked to decide whether that absence matters.
The drop in eThekwini is one thread in a wider picture of political flux that Ipsos director and political analyst Mari Harris has been tracking through the largest in-house survey of political opinion in the country. Her reading is blunt: the African National Congress, which once dominated politics, Parliament and most local governments, is in continuing decline, and no party now commands strong majority support.
That decline touches communities differently depending on where they live. Nationally, ANC support has fallen to 30%, its lowest measured level. In Johannesburg it stands at 27%. In Durban it has sunk to just 10%, a figure that will shape the choices available to residents when they go to the polls in a city where their options are narrowing.
In the Western Cape, the story runs the other way. Harris’s latest survey, adjusted for registered voters, puts the Democratic Alliance at a small majority of 51% in Cape Town, a number that aligns with most surveys but which, she notes, will ultimately be determined by voter turnout. For Capetonians, the question is not whether the party will lead but how many of them actually show up. The DA, now in what Harris describes as its final squeeze, is campaigning against votes for small parties and urging residents not to split their ballots.
Johannesburg presents a different contest altogether. Ipsos has the DA leading the ANC there, 30% against 27%, a narrow margin that leaves the city’s voters facing one of the tightest races in the country. In Tshwane, the DA sits at 34% to the ANC’s 31%, a figure that tallies with all polls thus far, as Paul Berkowitz has reported.
Three major stories emerge from the campaign’s surveys, according to Harris: the continued decline of the ANC, the growth of the DA (though not as high as the party would want), and the growth of MK, stunted by Zuma’s illness and what the source describes as shenanigans within the party. But the larger narrative underneath all of this is fragmentation. With 546 registered parties on the ballot, voters face a genuine conundrum, and the country is moving steadfastly toward coalition politics.
For Harris, that means the people who will actually run municipalities after election day are likely to be coalitions rather than single parties. “Looking at the pre-election surveys conducted, we will probably have new coalition governments in most of the metropolitan municipalities after the elections, and there will be many local and district councils governed by coalitions,” she says. That is a prospect with real consequences for residents: the services, budgets and decisions that shape daily life will depend on parties learning to work together.
South Africans, it seems, are ready for that. The first Ipsos Pulse of the People survey for 2026 showed 42% support for the Government of National Unity, a level regarded as strong. “Currently, two-thirds of South Africans believe different political parties should also work together on local government and municipal levels,” Harris says, pointing to a public appetite for workable coalitions.
Whether the ANC can still change the picture remains an open question. The party has finally found its campaigning muscle, a fresh team has taken the steering wheel, and it is in its final surge with high visibility across the country. That could stem its losses. “In past elections, the ANC always succeeded in making real inroads during the last few weeks of campaigning before an election, and we will have to see whether they succeed in mobilising the ‘surge’ again this time,” says Harris. For voters in Durban, Johannesburg and beyond, the final weeks will decide who ends up governing the councils they rely on.