In South Africa’s November 1 local government elections, the African National Congress (ANC) got 46% of the country-wide vote, falling below an outright majority for the first time.

The party’s declining hegemony, its failure to suppress factionalism and to keep a tight rein on state patronage, now the possibility that it will need to form a coalition government after national elections in 2024, these developments are generating a surge in confidence in the prospects of alternatives, encouraging breakaways and formations of other new parties. Commentators have stressed the drama of the result, announcing a period of sweeping change, but the ANC’s own tally obscures lines of enduring continuity.

The party system is fragmenting, but this is happening within a framework of political divisions and alliances constructed by Apartheid and the anti-Apartheid movement. There is no clear process of realignment, no plausible social force around which a new regime might consolidate, with just the tentative emergence of a new right and a resurgent movement of civics and residents’ associations. What this portends is a period of disorganization, government by a disintegrating African nationalist movement, increasingly externalized from the ANC itself into inter-party coalitions.