DURBAN, KwaZulu-Natal — The Democratic Alliance will not enter into any coalition with the MK Party in eThekwini, the party’s mayoral candidate Haniff Hoosen said as municipal election results continued to trickle in, drawing a firm red line around the metro’s R75-billion budget and warning that the MK Party’s internal “cash crisis” makes it unfit to govern the city.
Hoosen’s remarks came while the MK Party held a commanding lead in the count, but with no party anywhere near the majority needed to govern South Africa’s third-largest metro outright.
Where the numbers stood
At the results centre, the MK Party was ahead of all other parties on 34.86%, leading 12 councils and having already taken control of three municipalities. The Inkatha Freedom Party followed on 21.89%, with the African National Congress close behind on 21.51% and the Democratic Alliance on 11.79%.
Fourteen hung councils had been recorded at that stage, with 68% of the vote calculated. Roughly 3,400 of about 5,028 voting districts had submitted their results to the Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC), leaving a substantial portion of the count outstanding.
“We’re not going to work with the MK Party”
Asked whether the DA would consider cooperating with the MK Party if no candidate secured an outright majority, Hoosen was blunt: the party had already ruled it out.
He pointed to what he described as the MK Party’s internal financial troubles, arguing that the DA could not allow the party “to get their hands onto a 75 billion rand budget”. He also raised governance concerns, saying the DA could not partner with a party that would have to be monitored to ensure it was not involved in tender corruption.
According to Hoosen, keeping the MK Party below 50% had been the DA’s objective from the outset of the campaign — an outcome he claimed the incoming results were already delivering. He said it was “highly unlikely” the party would reach that threshold.
A coalition maths problem — and a warning to smaller parties
Hoosen said a coalition government in eThekwini was a real possibility, but declined to name potential partners before the final seat allocation was confirmed. Roughly 113 seats are needed to govern the city, he noted.
He also flagged the role of one or two smaller parties that could emerge as kingmakers, issuing a warning about any of them choosing to prop up the MK Party. Voters, he argued, had deliberately withheld a majority from the party, and any small party that handed it power anyway would find itself “on the other side of favour with voters”.
The DA, he said, was willing to work with parties that shared its vision of a Durban that progresses — while insisting the story was far from over. Hoosen claimed the DA had displaced the ANC in eThekwini for the first time in Durban’s history and described the party as being on a growth path, saying a large number of DA votes were still outstanding and had yet to reflect on the results board. Speaking during the count, he estimated that under 40% of the vote had been captured at that point and predicted a clearer picture by the end of the day.
Split voting: MK on the ward, DA on the PR ballot
One of the trends Hoosen said the party had picked up was split voting. In some results, large numbers of voters who backed the MK Party in ward contests chose the DA on the proportional representation ballot.
He also claimed that thousands of people in township communities where the DA had never previously received votes had supported the party for the first time.
The message, in his reading, was that even some MK-supporting voters wanted the DA to act as a check on the party — a governing party balanced by a strong opposition, which he called an important principle of democracy.
“Durban belongs to all of us”
Hoosen closed with a pledge that the DA would put residents’ interests first, regardless of which party they voted for, and would continue fighting for everyone who lives in the city and wants to build a Durban they can be proud of.
With counting still under way and 14 hung councils already on the board, the final shape of eThekwini’s government — and the coalition arithmetic that will decide it — remained unresolved.
