South Africa eased surprisingly well into its first national coalition government after the 2024 election, but the glow faded quicker than you can say GNU.
The 10-party GNU that is leading the seventh administration came together in just two weeks. The reality has now hit home that coalition building is a great deal more complex than the parties to the GNU had expected.
The first major crisis was the budget. This dispute is still unresolved and it threatens to unravel the GNU in its current configuration. If the political will is there, members of the GNU need to go back to the drawing board and look at countries with decades-long experience in national coalitions for guidance.
Germany’s ambassador to South Africa, Andreas Peschke, has written extensively about his country’s experience in coalition building. As it happens, in the past two weeks German conservatives under Friedrich Merz agreed to a coalition deal with the centre-left Social Democrats, based on a “treaty” spanning 144 pages and aimed at reviving growth in Europe's largest economy.
“We have fairly detailed coalition agreements,” Peschke tells the FM. “Actually we call them coalition treaties, though they are not treaties in a legal sense, but they are politically binding.”
He points out that coalition models cannot necessarily be transferred. Different political systems and conditions shape them from country to country. For instance, Germany has a 5% threshold of votes for political parties to enter parliament, while in the neighbouring Netherlands, also run by a coalition government, there are no thresholds.
As South Africa’s coalition baptism of fire continues, the idea of a “treaty” or guiding document is a valuable one, which the 10-party GNU did not take the time to negotiate and enact.
Peschke says the German document is detailed, down to the level of priorities for each government department. “It has 144 pages, so it’s quite long, and the charm of this is that in these documents we have a fairly detailed programme for the next legislative cycle.
“Basically, everybody is on the same page, and it gives instructions on what to do, what kind of legislative initiatives to take for the incoming government. If you put it down to the work of individual ministries, it’s also a work programme based on the political priorities of the new coalition. So we found it quite helpful, because it gives a stable framework to the coalition.”
Such an agreement could have averted the impasse over the budget. But in South Africa, the time allowed between the announcement of the election result and the election of the president is just two weeks.
Peschke says: “After our most recent election, at the end of February, it took the political parties basically six weeks to negotiate the coalition treaty — this was actually quite fast for our standards. We had times when they needed eight weeks or even a couple of months.
“Obviously, in a system where parliament, as in South Africa, has two weeks to reconvene and to vote for a new president, that is a very short period. So it makes it very difficult. I think it’s impossible to negotiate a detailed document like ours in such a short time.”
Another benefit of such an agreement, which would require compromise from all sides, is that parties can be held accountable to it, as priorities are outlined from the outset.
“The success or not of the coalition and of the individual partners can actually be measured against what they contracted to do,” says Peschke. “So voters will see what they promised in the electoral campaign, and how much of their programme issues can be found in the coalition agreement.”
After the latest talks between the ANC and the DA, parties agreed that a “reset” was necessary to move the coalition forward, but there are pitfalls.
The “reset” could mean a whole new arrangement, where the GNU is overhauled to the exclusion of the DA and the FF Plus. There could be a far-reaching cabinet reshuffle and a shake-up of the coalition government in KwaZulu-Natal and possibly the Northern Cape.
It could also mean that the existing parties agree to reach a much more detailed understanding on the way forward, a “middle of the road” option, which could perhaps include a German-style coalition treaty. This would seem the best option in terms of stability and confidence.
But the impasse over the budget has hardened attitudes in the ANC, particularly among those who were not in favour of a tie-up with the DA from the outset. There are similar divisions in the DA. Internal party dynamics may in the end trump the reality that the GNU, as it exists now, has the best shot at taking South Africa forward.
Peschke says he cannot give advice to South Africa in its coalition-building endeavours, but adds that the GNU has “done quite a lot of important work. It’s really crucial to build trust, and this is a process — you don’t build trust in a day and then that’s it. You need to build trust basically every day.”
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