PETER BRUCE | A strange quiet hangs over these elections

It’s just four more editions of the Sunday Times until the 2026 local government elections and you’d be forgiven for thinking nothing is happening. There are posters up in some places, but not everywhere. And apart from some staged events there’s little debate. Helen Zille has been colourful in Johannesburg and, er, that’s about it.

Before he died in 2016, Allister Sparks wrote a column in Business Day warning that local elections a few months later would be a referendum on the catastrophic presidency of Jacob Zuma. They were. That November the DA, led by Mmusi Maimane, scored its biggest ever share of the national vote — 26.9%. Subsequent DA efforts have not even come close.

This time around, with Geordin Hill-Lewis leading the DA as mayor of Cape Town, there’s little sense of that 2016 moment. Maybe just as well. The country then was being run by a corrupt cabal which knew exactly what it was doing. Today, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, you can’t say quite the same thing. Ramaphosa is trying to reform aspects of the economy, but he has been incapable of uniting his party and he has, as a result, capitulated to it. The result is chaos, but not quite with the old Zumaesque intent.

Not that there are no fascinating results in the offing. Will Zille win Johannesburg for the DA? Who would be her coalition partners of choice if, as is likely, she doesn’t win a majority? Will Zuma’s MK party take Durban (eThekwini) — it would be a huge victory, full of political and economic consequence. Can the ANC hold on in places like Bloemfontein or Nelson Mandela Bay?

Even asking these questions is a measure of the electoral mire into which the ANC has sunk under Ramaphosa, and the race to take the ANC leadership at the end of next year is wide open with both obvious candidates for the job — Deputy President Paul Mashatile and ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula — in all kinds of trouble. Mashatile is mysteriously unwell and Mbalula made such a mess of registering ANC candidates for the November 4 elections his big provincial supporters have abandoned him.

Hill-Lewis, almost Zen-like in his relaxed leadership style, is nonetheless being tested

If by some miracle he manages to save face in the next few weeks, my money was always on him succeeding Ramaphosa. Mbalula may play the fool, and he may occasionally even be one. But he’s an operator and popular inside the ANC.

And the fact is that the ANC that sits down to negotiate the creation of a new governing coalition after the 2029 general elections will be a vastly different animal to what it is now. It’ll be smaller, down on the 40% it won in 2024, and it will have to make some excruciating choices.

Let’s assume the ANC national share trend continues down on November 4. It got 53.9% of the vote in 2016 and 45% in 2021, when the DA vote under John Steenhuisen collapsed back down to 21.6% from the Maimane 2016 high. So, this time the ANC slide continues to, say, 38%. At best.

The DA meanwhile is standing in every ward in the country in this election. No other party (the ANC thanks to Mbalula) is. Hill-Lewis, almost Zen-like in his relaxed leadership style, is nonetheless being tested. He needs, at the very least, to outperform Maimane’s 26.9% next month.

If not, what was the point of sacking a perfectly plausible black leader after the 2019 general elections? And if he can’t match Maimane’s numbers now, given the state of the country, Hill-Lewis’s climb for 2029 becomes really steep. And if the ANC, under a new leader, is to get 35%-38% of the vote in a general election in three years’ time, Hill-Lewis needs to be very close behind.

And then they need to do a deal: a marriage of opposites, the best kind. It is a complex and untidy business, this coalition stuff, but our politics finds a new equilibrium when the ANC and the DA are able to govern in centrist coalitions wherever possible — in national, provincial and local governments — with solid majorities.

The ANC, for all its faults and corruption, retains a legitimacy in the electorate that cannot be lightly discounted. And the DA has a solid record of governance where it has majorities. The two together promise a stability the country desperately needs.

Leadership would matter. Smaller parties would rail against them, but for both the ANC and the DA the fact is that their current partners — small leftish black parties for the ANC and small right-wing white ones for the DA — are often toxic for both of them. If November 4 does nothing else, let’s hope it lights up a clear path forward for the political middle.