Helen Zille looks straight ahead as she marches into the muddy courtyard at Helen Joseph Women’s Hostel. Residents pour out of derelict dwellings to meet the mayoral candidate. Their warm reception fends off the cold of winter on this Friday afternoon in July 2026. Alexandra township is ready to welcome a white politician.
The septuagenarian chats up residents in isiXhosa as she surveys conditions at the apartheid-era hostel. The absence of lifeless rodents is a pleasant surprise. To be sure, it represents some sort of improvement since her last visit, “but the amenities are still as shocking as ever”.
A walkabout unveils the miserable conditions in this city-run hostel. Here, residents sleep in rooms accessible only via dark, labyrinthine corridors. They eat in dusty kitchens with broken windows. They wash dishes with water stored in plastic bottles. They splash through puddles of urine to relieve themselves in communal toilets. They hang their clothes to dry over marshes of sewage. Somewhere near the laundry, an idle TLB teases R1.3 billion worth of improvements they have long stopped waiting for.
The hostel is a microcosm of Johannesburg. Electronics must be charged up in a race against time before the power vanishes. Bottles, buckets and tanks must be filled in case a pipe burst causes a prolonged interruption. Sewage flows out of broken pump stations, onto streets and into homes. Infrastructure projects stall. Such are the standards of service delivery in a world class African city, as residents experience them.
Zille’s campaign has focused on service delivery issues from the first. In March, she pledged to address water woes, transport challenges, unemployment and corruption. Half-a-million votes, she supposes, will win her a mandate to govern.
Things are looking up for the DA in Johannesburg. A Social Research Foundation (SRF) pre-election poll placed the party at 42%, while another, by Ipsos, tamed the figure to 28%. Either way, it is polling higher than it did on election day in 2021, when it garnered 26% of the vote.
This can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, Zille’s personal track record and her party’s generally consistent governance record — President Cyril Ramaphosa himself acknowledged the latter — have earned it the reluctant backing of former detractors. Secondly, old loyalties are less relevant to new, first-time voters who never experienced apartheid.
However, none of this guarantees an outright win. “I think that’s going to be a long stretch for the DA to achieve,” Jonathan Moakes surmises in an interview with Salaamedia. As far as he can tell, “it will be a coalition scenario”. In other words, the momentum may not be enough to get Zille across the line.
“Certainly, the DA’s number one challenge … is to win voters that have previously supported the African National Congress,” Moakes observes. “In addition, there’s also a high proportion of ANC voters that have opted for the ANC in the past who have simply decided to stay at home … The DA needs to attract them to the polls and then [convince them] to vote for the DA”.
While the political ice appears to be thawing in the townships, that alone will not be enough to deliver an outright victory in Johannesburg. The warm reception at the hostel signals a growing willingness among disillusioned residents to listen to an alternative, but converting local discontent into a decisive governing majority remains a formidable task.
Unless the DA can aggressively mobilise former ANC voters and coax the politically alienated back to the ballot box, Zille’s momentum will ultimately collide with the hard reality of coalition politics.
Read next: What will your next mayor do about GBV?
