LOCAL ELECTIONS 2026: A red beret in the Deep South — meet the EFF’s unlikely ward candidate

Gabrielle Maritz is reluctant to reduce people to demographics, but the Cape Town Ward 61 candidate might not be what many people expect from the EFF. She hopes to build a bridge between the party and people who may not have considered voting for it before.

Days before the 2026 local government elections, Gabrielle Maritz is on the campaign trail for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) as the party’s councillor candidate for Cape Town’s Ward 61, the area flanking the sea-swept south from Glencairn to Kommetjie.

Originally from Pretoria, a High School Overkruin matriculant of 2002, Maritz now considers herself “a Deep South local” – she lives with her wife and seven-year-old daughter on the coast between Simon’s Town and Fish Hoek.

With deliberate, thoughtful words, she relays her love for creative arts and animals. She speaks of Earth as a living organism. “We are one consciousness. This is the concept of ubuntu,” she says.

Maritz identifies as anti-capitalist and joined the EFF a year ago, initially more as an activist than a politician, she says. On her official campaign Facebook page, she outlines some primary motivations for her EFF candidacy as restoring a voice for the LGBTQIA community and restoring “quality services for everyone” in Ward 61, especially vulnerable people like the elderly and the homeless.

She tells Daily Maverick, “A lot of things have been said about the EFF. But if you go and you read the manifesto properly, it speaks about once we’ve redressed the past, once we’ve managed to have a more equitable system... At that point we don’t need to perpetuate racial classifications; then we can live in a truly nonracial society.”

Maritz voices reluctance to reduce people to demographics. “I don’t think of myself or anybody as necessarily a certain demographic, because we all contain multitudes and no demographic is a monolith,” she says. However, she hopes to build a bridge between the EFF and people who may not have considered voting for the party before.

Asked whether she thinks she might inspire more Afrikaans people to join the party, she says: “I don’t know, we’ll have to see, because Afrikaans people have been scared of the EFF. Yet, some of my neighbours don’t mind, and some of them even help me.”

She adds: “You know, there is a certain Afrikaans demographic though that does despise me because of joining the EFF. They see me as a race traitor, a pariah. So I will never convince them of anything. And I wouldn’t necessarily try. I mean, I can just keep talking about our policies, talking about myself, trying to get through to them.”

Aged 42, Maritz’s background spans Pretoria, where she worked as a lecturer in media studies at Boston Media House, and London, where she obtained a diploma in music technology from West London College. She also lived for a while in Wexford in Ireland, a town “with lots of creative energy” where she bunkered down with her wife during the Covid lockdown, immersed in writing and book culture.