- Western Cape MEC Anton Bredell warned that “kingmaker politics” after the local elections could paralyse municipalities.
- The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s Coalitions Barometer 2026 revealed that 80 of South Africa’s 213 councils had been hung since 2021.
- Sixteen out of the 30 municipalities in the Western Cape were declared hung during the 2021 local government elections.
“Kingmaker politics” could bring municipal decision-making and service delivery to a standstill after the local government elections, with smaller parties potentially holding the balance of power in councils, Western Cape Local Government MEC Anton Bredell has warned.
In an interview with News24 on Wednesday, a week before the polls, Bredell said his biggest concern was that parties that win only one or two seats could determine who governs a municipality, using their position to negotiate senior political appointments, rather than prioritising residents’ needs.
He described it as a “worst-case scenario”, adding: “It’s king-making politics.”
“It’s a ransom kind of situation where small parties determine who’s going to govern, especially a single small party with one or two seats. That’s a nightmare.”
Bredell warned that political horse-trading could leave municipalities vulnerable to instability, with smaller parties wielding significant influence despite winning only a handful of seats.
The concern comes against the backdrop of South Africa’s growing experience of coalition government.
The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection’s (Mistra) Coalitions Barometer 2026 found that 80 of the country’s 213 municipal councils had been hung at some point between the 2021 local government elections and February this year.
A hung council is one in which no single political party holds a majority of seats.
The report revealed that the 80 municipalities had produced 175 different governing arrangements by February, illustrating how frequently political groupings can change. Half of the 175 administrations lasted less than 21 months.
The Western Cape accounted for 16 of the 80 municipalities in Mistra’s dataset, which tracked councils that became hung after the 2021 elections or subsequently. These included Knysna, Kannaland, George and Theewaterskloof.
Bredell said the danger was not coalitions themselves, which he acknowledged were part of South Africa’s constitutional democracy, but the political bargaining that could follow if no party secured an outright majority.
“The drafters of our Constitution actually drafted the Constitution so that there’s no majority bullying kind of government,” he said.
“It’s difficult to manage. The bigger problem is king-making politics.”
‘It’s all about the gain, not about service delivery’
Bredell said a party with one or two seats could hold the balance of power if larger parties fell short of a majority, potentially securing the mayoralty despite having limited support and institutional capacity.
He said:
The party with the fewest votes gets a mayor, doesn’t have any backup or any systems in place. It’s all about the gain, not about service delivery. That’s our biggest, biggest negative and the biggest thing that I think will negatively impact the voters.
He said coalition negotiations could become particularly contentious when municipalities needed to approve budgets, implement infrastructure projects or make critical administrative decisions.
Bredell described negotiations over municipal budgets as a potential “hostage situation”, in which parties threaten to withdraw their support unless their demands are met.
“[It becomes a case of] ‘I want X, Y and Z. And if you don’t give it to me, I jump and give government to somebody else’,” he said.
Bredell argued that the disputes could shift attention away from residents and towards the political interests of coalition partners.
“And then it’s not about the voter anymore. It’s not about my citizens. It’s not about my municipality. It’s about my own ego,” he said.
Bredell said changes in political leadership could also trigger attempts by new governing groupings to remove municipal managers and directors, disrupting the administration.
“The whole system comes to a standstill,” he said.
“You can break down a municipality very quickly. But to rebuild… remember, we sit with a lot of pressure on the current system.”
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He cited Oudtshoorn and Theewaterskloof as examples of municipalities where political instability and weak decision-making had contributed to problems that could not easily be resolved by a new council.
“The new council won’t be able to fix that within at least two and a half to three years,” he said.
Bredell also pointed to Knysna, where he said there was no mayor, describing the situation as particularly problematic with election day approaching.
Public coalition agreements a ‘must’
He said political parties should enter formal coalition agreements and make them publicly available so residents can scrutinise the commitments made during negotiations.
“We must make it public. Let the public also know exactly what we signed with one another.”
His call came after the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, working with the provincial government and the Hanns Seidel Foundation, developed guidelines on maintaining administrative continuity during coalition instability.
The Administrative Continuity During Coalition Instability Guidelines outline how municipalities can protect their administrations during periods of political leadership change, including clearer rules, defined responsibilities, and safeguards for municipal officials’ work.
The guidelines say coalition instability can manifest in several ways, including the removal of mayors or speakers, vacant political positions, council meetings not taking place, and key decisions, such as approving budgets or integrated development plans, being delayed.
They also warn that prolonged uncertainty could undermine staff morale and productivity, with officials potentially halting projects when they anticipate changes in political leadership.
In addition, the document says instability can create conditions in which oversight weakens and the risk of fraud, corruption and the misuse of resources increases.
It does not suggest that coalition government is inherently problematic. Instead, it argues that political changes should not be allowed to undermine the functioning of the municipal administration.
Meanwhile, Bredell questioned the sustainability of coalitions involving numerous parties at municipal level, saying they could complicate integrated development planning and budget processes.
“The seven-party coalition things on a local level don’t work. It’s problematic,” he said.
He argued that councillors needed the legal knowledge, institutional support and administrative resources to govern effectively, adding that smaller parties often lacked the support structures available to larger political organisations.
Bredell said councillors had a responsibility to represent all residents of their municipality, regardless of whom they had voted for, saying,
After the election, you represent the people of your municipality, not your party anymore.
He also cautioned against the assumption that the provincial or national government could simply take over when a municipality experienced political or administrative failures.
Bredell said the Constitution established three spheres of government, with provincial and national authorities responsible for monitoring and supporting local government, but that formal intervention required legal processes.
As an example, he cited the provincial government’s response to pollution in Knysna’s lagoon, saying it had conducted 44 compliance inspections and issued nine directives before the matter reached court.
The process, he said, illustrated how long it could take to address municipal failures through formal enforcement mechanisms.
Bredell argued that voters needed to consider the governing capacity and support structures behind the candidates they elected.
“Voting is serious,” he said.
Bredell added that, in his view, the best outcome was a council with a governing majority and an opposition capable of holding it accountable.
“The best will be that you’ve got somebody in control of the council and you’ve got an opposition,” he said.
Coalitions do not automatically mean instability
Mistra’s research found that although governing arrangements changed frequently, many coalitions survived for years.
Of the 70 hung councils that emerged from the 2021 local government elections, 23 were still governed by essentially the same administration four years later. In 46 of the 80 municipalities tracked, the party that initially led the governing administration had not lost power entirely by February 2026.
The report found that motions of no confidence were the most common reason for the end of administrations. Of 101 changes recorded by February, 47 followed a motion of no confidence.
However, Mistra also examined whether repeated coalition collapses were associated with poorer municipal audit outcomes.
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It found no statistically reliable association between the number of coalition collapses and audit results for the 78 municipalities whose 2024/25 audits were complete. The report cautioned that the sample was relatively small and that further research was needed to understand how political instability might affect governance and service delivery.
The findings suggest that while coalition instability is a significant political and administrative challenge, its effects cannot be automatically inferred from the number of government changes alone.
Fragmentation and accountability failures
Dr Lungelwa Kaywood, an extraordinary associate at Stellenbosch University’s School of Public Leadership, said the Western Cape could see more hung councils after the elections, with the number of parties contesting and dissatisfaction with established political leadership contributing to a more fragmented political landscape.
“It’s not whether we will have hung councils, it’s how many and where,” she said.
Kaywood said South Africa’s proportional representation system allowed parties with relatively small shares of the vote to secure council seats, making it harder for a single party to win an outright majority, particularly in smaller municipalities.
She said the rise in political parties could reflect both frustration with established parties and genuine community grievances.
“More parties perhaps reflect a real democratic choice and voter dissatisfaction with the so-called established parties that we’ve had and known for a long time,” she said.
“Local civic parties are also born from genuine community grievances.”
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Kaywood cautioned that hung councils were not necessarily bad for democracy, but said stable coalitions needed clear rules and greater discipline in how they were formed and maintained.
She pointed to the coalition guidelines developed by the Dullah Omar Institute and its partners as a potential tool for protecting municipal administrations from political instability.
But Kaywood argued that the challenges facing local government extended beyond coalition negotiations to the broader failure to hold municipalities accountable.
Using Knysna and Kannaland as examples, she said municipalities could face different combinations of financial and governance challenges, requiring responses that took their circumstances into account.
She said existing oversight mechanisms were not always being used effectively, despite the constitutional responsibilities of provincial and national government to support and, where necessary, intervene in struggling municipalities.
The accountability ecosystem is broken. It’s broken at a national level, it’s broken at a provincial government level, it’s broken at a council level, it’s broken even at the active citizen level.
Adding, “It just seems like local government is an arena now that nobody can hold to account, yet we’ve got all these instruments to hold local government to account.”
The Auditor-General’s 2024/25 consolidated report on local government audit outcomes provides further context on the challenges facing municipalities. It found that the Western Cape continued to lead the country in the number of municipalities achieving clean audits, but warned that declines in audit outcomes indicated weaknesses in governance and internal controls.
The report called on incoming mayors and councillors to demonstrate capable and ethical leadership, and urged the national and provincial government to exercise oversight responsibilities consistently.
Marvin Charles
www.news24.com