Women's Municipal Representation Plummets as South Africa's Coalition Politics Reshape Loc

SOUTH AFRICA’S COALITION SURGE COINCIDES WITH STALLED GAINS IN WOMEN’S LOCAL REPRESENTATION

Women held 41% of South African municipal council seats in 2016. By the 2021 elections, that share had fallen to 36.9%, and the drop was sharpest in the categories that matter most. Women’s share of proportional representation seats collapsed from 48% to 24.2%, while their share of ward seats fell from 33% to 12.7%. Over the same period, the number of local coalition governments more than doubled, suggesting the two trends are not coincidental.

As the 2026 Local Government Elections approach, South Africa faces this dual challenge head-on: coalition proliferation is reshaping how governing majorities are assembled, and women are losing ground in the process.

The mechanism appears rooted in how parties build candidate lists and how coalitions get negotiated. Historically, the African National Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters enforced internal gender quota systems, including zebra lists that alternate male and female candidates. South Africa has no legislation requiring any party to adopt such mechanisms. The Democratic Alliance and Action SA explicitly reject gender quotas in favour of what they describe as merit-based selection. Rise Mzansi has adopted a quota system, but the fragmentation of the vote across more parties has diluted women’s overall representation rather than strengthened it.

The problem deepens at the negotiating table. Mokgadi Mogane of the Commission for Gender Equality has identified a pattern in which gender parity becomes an early casualty of coalition bargaining. Women are frequently excluded from those negotiations altogether, and when they are present, gender equality can be traded away as a bargaining chip rather than defended as a non-negotiable principle. Holding a council seat, in other words, does not guarantee meaningful decision-making power.

Meanwhile, the barriers women face extend well beyond coalition dynamics. The United Nations has documented that nearly 60% of women parliamentarians and over 70% of women journalists experience sexist abuse online. In some countries, up to 44% of women report that online harassment escalates into offline violence. A global study by The Economist found that 40% of women have experienced online abuse, while 85% have witnessed digital violence against other women. Institutional chauvinism, exclusion, and epistemic injustice compound these pressures at every level of political life.

What makes this particularly striking is that women have comprised the majority of registered voters in South Africa since 1994. Political engagement has not been the problem. Conversion of that engagement into sustained representation and real authority has.

Research consistently shows that higher women’s participation in local government improves governance quality, strengthens policy-making, and enhances community resilience. South Africa’s constitutional commitments and the National Policy Framework for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality reflect an awareness of this. Progress, however, has stalled precisely as coalitions have become the dominant feature of municipal politics.

Legislative intervention faces resistance. The Local Government: Municipal Structures Amendment Bill, gazetted in 2024, contains no gender parity provisions, and direct mandates for equal representation are opposed by parties that reject quota systems on principle. Supplementary approaches are therefore being considered. Broad educational programmes aimed at countering sexist attitudes, capacity-building initiatives for women and young people seeking elected office, and targeted support systems for sitting councillors (including childcare provision, harassment reporting mechanisms, and peer networks) could each play a role in reversing the decline.

The question heading into 2026 is whether any of those interventions will be in place in time, or whether coalition governance will continue to consolidate at the expense of the women who make up the majority of the electorate.