South Africans voted on Wednesday in local elections expected to deliver another heavy blow to the African National Congress, with anger over water outages, power cuts and crumbling infrastructure driving voters away from the party that ended apartheid.

The ANC is still likely to be the largest party, according to The Guardian, but it is on course for a bruising result and polls suggest it could fall below a third of the vote nationally. More than 500 parties are contesting the elections, the BBC reported.

Election officials said voting was going smoothly despite long queues at some polling stations. Leaders are competing to run South Africa's nearly 300 municipalities, which are responsible for the services residents experience most directly: water, electricity and refuse collection.

A vote about water and power

The campaign has been dominated by the things that have stopped working. Municipal water systems in several cities have failed for days at a time, power cuts remain a daily burden, and roads and sewage plants in many towns have decayed.

Those failures are local, and so is the accountability. A voter angry about a dry tap or an uncollected bin is judging the council that runs the pipes, not the national government. That makes municipal elections the most direct test of the ANC's record in government.

The party's campaign has leaned on its history and on warnings that the alternatives are worse. Critics say that argument has worn thin after three decades in power and a series of corruption scandals that reached into state-owned enterprises and municipal contracts.

The long slide in support

The ANC had a disastrous showing in the last national election, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994, when apartheid ended. It has governed since then in coalition with rivals, an arrangement that has forced compromises and made it easier for opponents to blame it for gridlock.

Support has dropped for years because of anger over corruption, unemployment and inequality. The party remains the biggest single political force in the country, and its organisational reach is still unmatched, which is why predictions of its collapse have repeatedly proved premature.

But the trend is clear. Each election since 2009 has cost the ANC support, and the question now is not whether it loses ground but how much and to whom.

Why municipalities matter so much

Municipalities are where the state meets the citizen. They set water and electricity tariffs, award contracts for infrastructure, and employ the staff who fix leaks and collect rubbish. When they fail, the failure is visible every day.

That has made local government the front line of South African politics. Opposition parties have built their campaigns around service delivery audits, and civil society groups have used court cases to force councils to publish their spending.

The ANC's response has been a mix of promises to clean up and appeals to loyalty. Both are under strain. A generation of voters who did not experience apartheid has no personal memory of the liberation struggle to draw on.

Coalitions are now the norm

The most likely outcome is another round of coalition negotiations in the major cities. The mayoralty of Tshwane, which contains Pretoria, has rotated between parties four times since 2020, a pattern that has made local government unstable and slowed decision-making.

Coalitions have also produced unusual alliances, some of them between parties with incompatible ideologies. The result is that voters who want change may get a different set of compromises rather than a clean alternative.

What the result will change

A bad night for the ANC would strengthen the case for internal reform and weaken the leadership that has resisted it. It would also embolden opposition parties ahead of the next national election.

For residents, the immediate question is whether any of the promised fixes arrive before the next failure. That is the measure by which local elections are judged, and it is not one that any party can talk its way out of.

The lesson of the past decade is that South Africa's voters are willing to punish incumbents for services they can see. The ANC's problem is that the services are visible to everyone, every day.

The coalition arithmetic matters as much as the headline percentage. In the largest cities, the ANC may need partners to hold a majority, and those partners will extract concessions in exchange for support. That has already produced unstable arrangements in Tshwane and Johannesburg, where mayors have changed several times without a national election.

For voters, the practical consequence is that the council that fails to fix a pipe may be a different council from the one they elected. That makes accountability harder, and it gives the ANC an argument it has used before: blame the coalition partners. Whether it works this time depends on whether the taps run.

South Africa's vote is not the only election under scrutiny: the ballot disputes that have reshaped US election law, the Alaska Senate investigation that put ballots at the centre of a criminal probe and how early voting numbers became a political story all turned on how votes are counted.