2026 Final Election Results: ANC, DA, MK Party, EFF, and ActionSA

The Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) announced the results of the 2026 Local Government Elections, with a few shocks along the way.

• Get the full results on the Newsday Election Dashboard

South Africa’s local government elections took place between Monday, 2 November 2026, and Wednesday, 4 November 2026.

The IEC announced that there were 29.2 million registered voters, of which 14.9 million voted, equating to a turnout rate of 52%.

The elections were contested by 520 political parties, with 137,000 candidates in 213 councils, where 10,526 seats were available.

The IEC’s chief electoral officer, Sy Mamabolo, said that during the elections, 56,000 voter management devices were deployed.

188,000 electoral personnel were mobilised to administer 23,696 voting stations across South Africa.

“This is a substantial national workforce, mobilised, trained and deployed to perform specific functions within a tightly coordinated electoral operation,” he said.

Just over 100 million ballot papers were printed, and 28 million were superseded following the Constitutional Court order.

This was an undertaking of considerable scale, requiring planning, coordination of production processes, quality assurance, and distribution arrangements.

“These are not merely operational statistics. They represent the scale of institutional capacity required to administer elections in South Africa,” said Mamabolo.

“They also demonstrate why election administration must be approached as an integrated national operation, rather than a collection of isolated activities.”

“The Commission will continue to evaluate its operational performance, document lessons and identify areas where improvements are necessary.”

2026 Local Government Election Results

The African National Congress (ANC) achieved the highest share of the vote at 30.76%, and it won 3,246 council seats.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) was the second-largest party with 24.64% of the vote and 1,695 council seats.

Former President Jacob Zuma’s party, uMkhonto weSizwe, finished third, followed by Julius Malema’s EFF and Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA.

The ANC leads in 128 municipalities and won 53 municipalities outright. The DA leads in 32 municipalities and won 12 outright.

Only 74 of the 213 municipal councils in South Africa returned an outright majority for a single party, leaving 139 hung councils requiring coalitions.

The table below provides an overview of the performance of the top parties in the 2026 local government elections.

Full 2026 election results