DA federal council chair Helen Zille is cautiously optimistic about the party’s electoral showing in Johannesburg in the 2026 municipal polls, but has warned that the emergence of the MK party continued to shift the political terrain in the city.
The DA named Zille as its mayoral candidate for Johannesburg in 2026, with the aim of consolidating its support in the city, which has been bogged down by unstable coalitions.
President Cyril Ramaphosa led a national executive delegation that met the Johannesburg executive council in March as part of efforts to aimed at addressing service delivery challenges in a metro that is responsible for 16% of SA’s GDP and employs 12% of the national workforce.
The DA’s polling, which has previously been accurate, suggests that if South Africans voted today, the ANC would not get more than 20% of the vote in Johannesburg.
In an interview with Business Day, Zille acknowledged the disruptive force of MK, which under former president Jacob Zuma has drawn strong support among Zulu nationalist voters. MK emerged as the third-largest party in the 2024 general election, with its main support coming from KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.
“MK really has captured the Zulu nationalist market and there are many Zulu speakers in Gauteng and in Johannesburg in particular and a lot of them voted for MK,” she said.
“MK is not new on the scene. They voted for MK last year in the election and there was a significant number of them. So clearly that does impact the political terrain.”
She, however, stopped short of possibly partnering with MK despite the traction the party has gained with voters in the 2024 general elections. “I think it’ll be highly unlikely, if not impossible, for us to do any kind of coalition with MK. But they do shape the political terrain to a certain extent,” she said.
Last year Zille described the EFF as the DA’s main competitor, predicting that SA would polarise between centrist forces and the radical left. She still holds that view.
“The EFF can be joined by other parties. They have been joined by other parties. They’ve been joined by MK. Now, obviously they’re different parties, they have different leaders, but they have the same broad political philosophy,” she said.
“The party believes that it should control the state, and once it controls the state, it should control the economy ... So they pretty much one of the same political philosophy and now they’re in that particular corner of the triangle that I always used to draw, and we’re trying to create the counterweight to that.”
With Hajra Omarjee
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