Treat our local elections with care or risk foreign meddling

South Africa’s next local government elections will not be stolen with ballot boxes or soldiers.

- Lindani Zungu

If they are interfered with, it will be done quietly: through narratives, money flows, algorithms and timing. That is how modern power moves.Dismissing municipal elections as politically minor may be the most dangerous mistake South Africans make this decade.

Democracies rarely collapse in national spectacles. They erode in contests deemed too small to guard fiercely. Local elections are low on turnout, fragmented in attention and heavy on coalition uncertainty. This is where foreign influence finds its easiest entry points. In South Africa’s geopolitical climate, that vulnerability is real.

Deteriorating US-South Africa relations have transformed what might have been a routine electoral cycle into something more consequential. Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, diplomatic friction has hardened into strategic estrangement.

The US’s documented history of election meddling shows a pattern: where governments are seen as ideologically hostile, economically inconvenient or geopolitically disobedient, electoral processes become instruments of influence. Often this occurs through agenda-setting, narrative-shaping and selective destabilisation rather than overt coercion. Between 1946 and 2000, the US intervened in dozens of foreign elections.