With most of the result due in Thursday, a major collapse of support for the ANC could pile pressure on Zuma, 74, to step down before his second term ends in 2019.
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With about half of the vote counted in the national count, the ANC held a 52 percent lead, against 31 percent for the DA and 9 percent for the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters.
Clearly the ANC still commands huge support across the country but that support is waning.
The EFF, which won six percent of the national vote in 2014, advocates land redistribution without compensation and the nationalisation of mines.
The ANC has lost a key municipality named after its star, Nelson Mandela Bay, to the Democratic Alliance. “The ANC is therefore becoming a party of the rural vote”, said Nomura analyst Peter Attard Montalto.
As the count drew to a close, Mandela’s party was on 54 percent – sharply down from 62 percent in the last municipal elections in 2011.
ANC chief whip Jackson Mthembu said the party was chastened by the results.
The DA expects to win 47% support in Nelson Mandela Bay, making it the largest party, and will start talks on forming a coalition to run the council once the vote count is complete, party leader Mmusi Maimane told reporters in Pretoria.
Stocks ended flat on Thursday as gold mining companies, which benefit from rand weakness, retreated in the face of the currency’s gains, while paper maker Sappi surrendered earlier hefty gains on stellar results.
“It will be very hard for the ANC, or the DA, or even the EFF, to find anyone but each other to do a deal”, Daniel Silke, director of Cape Town-based Political Futures Consultancy, said by phone.
The municipal election result is probably the biggest wake-up call the governing ANC has received since it ushered in democracy in South Africa in 1994.
The Economic Freedom Fighters party, that appeals to young Black militants-many too young to remember apartheid-is led by the charismatic Julius Malema, a former ally of Zuma and expelled leader of the ANC youth wing.
The DA a year ago elected its first black leader, Mmusi Maimane, as part of continued efforts to shake off its image as a party that mainly serves white interests.
South Africa’s electoral commission said late Wednesday voting proceeded smoothly and without major incident.
In the sprawling township of Soweto, famous for its resistance to white-minority rule, voters filed in to Orlando West High School on Wednesday morning, one of more than 22,000 polling stations.
The next presidential elections are due in 2019 but Mr Zuma can not stand for a third term.
The rand hit a nine-month high against the dollar and government bonds firmed on Thursday as the smooth local elections and expectations of continued low interest rates overseas boosted sentiment.
Zuma has been involved in several scandals during his seven years in office, including the more than $20 million of taxpayers’ money spent on updating his private home in Nkandla in the KwaZulu-Natal province.
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In December, his decision to dismiss the country’s respected finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, and replace him with a largely unknown and widely denounced Parliamentarian, sent the country’s rand currency to all-time lows against the US dollar and British pound.
