Unpredictable as the balance between political parties after next week’s elections may be, even bigger questions hover over the character of the South African state, government and policy under coalitions likely to be spawned by Election 2024.
While the ANC is throwing everything into the electoral mix to rescue state power for its exclusive use, including blatant electioneering through last-minute National Health Insurance legislation and at least temporarily improved Eskom operations, the jury remains out on whether this will bring an outright majority or land the ANC in the coalition government zone.
For the ANC, the sharing of prized electoral victory with any type or number of South Africa’s current opposition parties will bring humiliation and possibly irreversible losses of influence over policy and legislation. Equally, it will suffer reductions in sources of patronage and depletion of the opportunities that thrive on the party-political use of state resources.
The ANC government is not awaiting its possible coalition sentence in sedate silence. Much of the past few months has witnessed accelerated policymaking and legislation-manufacturing to ensure its preferred education policies, health service frameworks, and so forth, are entrenched before it potentially cedes exclusive power. It has also been trying hard to finalise its forward-planning policy and governance frameworks.
The presidency is very busy on this, for example with its medium-term — 2024-2029 — development plan. These actions can be seen as a campaign to ensure that the ANC national government has an arsenal of negotiation chips to weigh possible coalition negotiations in its favour. Much of these actions aim at crafting a fortress of ANC state power that coalition governments will find hard to undo.
Such embeddedness of ANC policy and preferences in state processes could help secure ANC influence for the foreseeable future. Unless South Africa undergoes a revolutionary overthrow of power — not on the cards by any stretch of the imagination — policy and legislative change will continue to happen incrementally, procedurally, even if societally there is immense need for change. Given the huge deficits in the ANC government’s prevailing policy, “stability” is often not the virtue it is made out to be. In addition — despite challenges to the constitution in the heat of the election campaign — constitutionalism is well entrenched in South African society. This is another pointer to the unlikelihood of far-reaching change despite possible pending coalitions.
Above all, South Africans are generally ideologically conservative; the bulk of the political parties cluster around an ideological centre. Extremism is more likely to be on the side of many variations on right-wing reactionary ideology than left-radicalism. Some of the “radical left” parties, such as the EFF and MK Party (which adds tribalism to its ideological stripes), are cases of talking radical and walking reactionary. The SACP, embedded in the ANC tripartite alliance, is the embodiment of the South African “ideology” of talk left and walk right. Had it not been for the flaunting of bogey terms such as “expropriation” and “nationalisation”, mostly with reference to land and mines, radicalism would have been almost undetectable in the South African party political landscape.
For the ANC, the sharing of prized electoral victory with any type or number of South Africa’s current opposition parties will bring humiliation and possibly irreversible losses of influence over policy and legislation
Majority and minority governments
Given this ideological and ideology setting, what are the core policy, governance and stability implications of the election results and coalition scenarios beyond the elections? The projections assume that the elections will run smoothly (enough), and that sporadic threats of disruption or rejection of results will not be substantive and will be managed sufficiently.
I differentiate six possible election-coalition outcomes and the likely policy and governance content they denote.
The first scenario, of the ANC still making the magical 50% outright majority, obviously holds few policy and governance change implications — except that for the sake of longer-term stability and transformative governance they should be made. Many of the ANC’s policies — most of all to create economic growth and jobs — need incisive change. The lack of substantive change and the likelihood of the ANC being unable to stop the rot in state institutions is most concerning. Given the ANC’s inability to date to arrest and reverse economic decline, this continuity is among the most unstable of outcomes.
In a second scenario, should the ANC come in marginally below a 50% national result, it would have a chance to run a minority government. Many in the ANC would cherish this result. At the 2023 National Coalitions Dialogue the ANC tried to sneak in the right of the biggest party (even if it holds less than 50%) to govern. Such “minority majoritarianism” is also present in the current embryonic legislation to manage local government coalitions after the 2026 elections.
The ANC would still need partners to elect a president, pass budgets, or get around the roughly 30 instances where the constitution specifies that decisions require a majority vote. Recent years’ local government coalition practice showed that when opposition parties recognise their inability to constitute a legislature bloc that exceeds that of the biggest party (in most of these cases the ANC) they will give this biggest party the space to govern, while selectively lending vote support on crucial decisions. At local government these formations have offered reasonable governance stability.
The rest of the coalition governance scenarios pivot on the depth of the ANC’s numerical shortfall. In these scenarios, as the ANC shortfalls below 50% increase, aspiring coalition partners become more demanding in their expectations of compromises and concessions. In light of the introductory observations, however, these are short of earth-shattering.
The ANC would live comfortably with the scenario of merely requiring top-up support, possibly by two or three micro-parties. This configuration will be manifested if the ANC scores 47%-48% of the national vote. Should the final weeks of the ANC’s stepped-up election campaign deliver dividends, this is likely to be South Africa’s coalitions future.
The ANC’s little satellite of groupie parties will likely strut their coalition support act, as at the local level, practically devoid of ideology and policy demands. A handful of community parties or independents could also step in nationally. Coalition operators such as the PA and Al Jama-ah wait in the wings, and old-guard ANC co-optive partners such as GOOD and the NFP are available, if they break the 0.25 threshold into parliamentary representation. If the trophy of position and/or community-specific delivery is high enough the PA, for example, will claim effective representation in the name of its constituency. The ANC, however, may have to deal with differences on high-visibility policy such as Palestine-Gaza and xenophobia.
The dangerous mid-zone
The more precarious choices rear their heads when the ANC falls into a mid-zone 45% result. Ideological colours (or ideological and policy pretence) will show. The IFP should fit the bill presented at this fourth scenario. It is generally more right-wing than the ANC, but has indicated willingness to link up with the ANC. In typical South African local coalitions style, it may discard its multiparty charter agreement, make few policy demands, and take the power that the smallish parties crave but will never taste unless in coalition with the ANC. The ANC-IFP coalition history of the 1990s, and the ANC’s keenness to regain KwaZulu-Natal footholds, will bolster this type of coalition.
The ANC’s KZN majority could also be restituted through rapprochement with the MK Party, potentially in the same popularity zone as the IFP, if not exceeding it. The MK Party imitates the ANC’s radical-speak-no-radical-action repertoire. However, the resentment — bordering on hatred — between the parties’ two leaders precludes it.
As the ANC shortfalls below 50% increase, aspiring coalition partners become more demanding in their expectations of compromises and concessions
Industry and investors cower and business takes cover at the fifth coalition possibility: an ANC and EFF collaboration. Yet as the above argument expressed, the EFF’s radicalism appears as more rhetorical than real. The recent reincarnation of commander-in-chief Julius Malema as the wearer of a grey suit, a sweet talker of business, bearing the message of beneficiation rather than nationalisation, sheds light on the party’s ambition to be part of the ANC’s power suite rather than a shining light of the Left.
The EFF does not want big sister ANC to see it as a liability. The differences between the ANC and EFF are often paper-thin. Personal relationships and friendships seal the historical, ANC Youth League bonds. Gauteng province and the pending provincial ANC-EFF coalition, along with the someday-soon national presidency of Paul Mashatile, elevate this possibility. If this type of EFF enters a coalition government with the ANC, it is likely to be largely on ANC terms. The ANC nevertheless remains wary of the potentially erratic EFF policy demands. This it shares with the DA.
Note that the Malema metamorphosis happened when the ANC showed interest in talking to the DA about forming a government of national unity (GNU). The DA is not a singular ANC target, but talking there is. In terms of policy, governance, and frequent convergence between the DA and ANC this could be an easy coalition. A GNU umbrella would help the ANC to get the DA into a coalition, should the ANC shortfall be that substantive and other parties unavailable.
However, the ANC fears the impact of this sixth scenario on its conventional support base. The next national election could see the ANC suffering toxic fallout. Supporters often punish their parties for their alliances in a preceding period of governance, as happened recently to the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) during the elections in Catalonia, Spain. The electorate disliked the ERC’s close national association with the Socialists. This punishment trend for antecedent coalitions happens globally, irrespective of actual policy compromises.
This set of policy and governance scenarios shows that even if Election 2024 results in ANC declines below 50%, and coalitions transpire, the ruling party is determined, and likely to, remain in or very close to power.
* Booysen is a political analyst and author and editor of books on the ANC and coalitions including, most recently, Marriages of Inconvenience: The Politics of Coalitions in South Africa. She is a visiting and emeritus professor at Wits University
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