PRETORIA, Friday 28 August 2026 — Freedom Front Plus Tshwane mayoral candidate Willie Spies has been sworn in as a councillor in the metropolitan council, filling the proportional-representation seat vacated after former caucus leader Grandi Theunissen left the party for the Democratic Alliance earlier this week.
The move places Spies directly inside the council he is campaigning to lead less than three months before the 4 November local government elections and allows the FF Plus to replace one of its most experienced departing municipal figures with its mayoral candidate.
Spies was sworn in on Thursday, 27 August, according to the FF Plus.
His appointment follows Theunissen’s resignation from the party and subsequent move to the DA, where he has joined the campaign of Tshwane mayoral candidate Cilliers Brink.
Because Theunissen served as a proportional-representation councillor, his departure did not transfer his existing council seat to the DA. The vacancy remained with the FF Plus and could be filled from the party’s list.
Spies now occupies that seat.
The change carries greater political significance than an ordinary mid-term replacement because Spies is already the FF Plus’s designated mayoral candidate for Tshwane.
The party selected the Pretoria attorney and former MP in February as the person it intends to put forward for mayor after the municipal elections.
At the time of his nomination, the FF Plus had presented Spies and Theunissen as a joint campaign team.
Theunissen, then the party’s Tshwane caucus leader and an experienced local-government figure, was expected to lead the campaign alongside Spies.
That arrangement collapsed after an internal dispute within the Tshwane caucus.
Theunissen was removed as caucus leader earlier in August following controversy surrounding the FF Plus caucus’s support for a proposed property development in Groenkloof despite the party’s public opposition to the project.
He subsequently resigned from the FF Plus and joined the DA.
His departure created both a council vacancy and an organisational problem for a party that had built much of its Tshwane campaign around the Spies-Theunissen partnership.
Installing Spies as a councillor partly reshapes that campaign.
It gives the mayoral candidate direct participation in Tshwane council proceedings and an opportunity to build a municipal record during the remaining weeks of the current council term.
Spies previously served as an FF Plus Member of Parliament between 2004 and 2009 before leaving frontline politics and developing a career in civil litigation.
He has represented civil-society organisations including AfriForum in several high-profile cases and stepped down as executive chairperson of Pretoria FM before entering the 2026 mayoral race.
The Tshwane contest is expected to be one of the most closely watched metropolitan elections in November.
ActionSA Mayor Nasiphi Moya is campaigning to retain the office, while the DA is seeking to return former mayor Cilliers Brink to power.
The ANC, EFF, FF Plus and several smaller parties are also competing for representation in a council where no party is expected to take outright control easily.
Coalition negotiations are therefore likely to be decisive.
The FF Plus has historically held one of its strongest municipal caucuses in Tshwane and entered the current election cycle seeking to expand its influence in the capital.
Theunissen’s switch to the DA created a direct challenge to that strategy because he takes years of FF Plus organisational and municipal experience into the campaign of one of its closest competitors.
Spies’s appointment now gives the FF Plus a more immediate institutional response.
Instead of contesting the mayoralty solely as an outside candidate, he will participate in the council during the closing phase of the current term and campaign as both mayoral candidate and sitting councillor.
The timing is also important because Friday, 28 August, is the final day for political parties and independent candidates to submit nominations for the November elections.
The Electoral Commission has set a hard deadline of 17:00, after which candidate submissions and ordinary corrections will no longer be permitted.
The FF Plus’s replacement of Theunissen therefore comes as parties complete their final municipal slates and move from internal candidate selection into the main campaign period.
For the FF Plus, the immediate test will be whether Spies can stabilise its Tshwane campaign after losing a senior local figure to the DA and whether the party can retain voters who previously identified with Theunissen’s municipal leadership.
For the DA, Theunissen’s arrival gives Brink an experienced former coalition colleague with direct knowledge of the FF Plus caucus and its support base.
The November election will show which side benefits more from the unusual exchange: the DA through Theunissen’s defection, or the FF Plus by placing its mayoral candidate directly into the Tshwane council before voters go to the polls.
