The future is coalitions as parties
With a dismal showing at the polls all the big parties will be jostling to run your municipality over next two weeks, with a few small kingmakers
It’s going to be a bloodbath, was the sentiment from an ANC national working committee (NWC) member, reflecting on the upcoming extended party meeting where a strategy on how to approach possible coalitions after this week’s local government elections will be discussed.
In one corner is ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa and his strongest ally, Gwede Mantashe, who are expected to canvass the party for a coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA) in a bartering exchange of the metros and hung municipalities.
In the other corner, treasurer general Paul Mashatile and possibly deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte, who will be advocating that the ANC takes its chances with the smaller parties and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).
Five high-up sources in the ANC have spoken anonymously with the Mail & Guardian, saying among the main topics on the agenda will be the party’s diagnosis of its election campaign and its overall performance.
Two NWC members each told the M&G that the campaign strategy was at the root of the ANC’S poor performance.
They said many in the national executive committee (NEC) were surprised when the ANC deviated from its initial strategy of localising the campaign and rather opting to base it on an apology tour.
“We were running 267 campaigns and what we did was to turn it into one campaign as if it’s national elections and everything followed through. Every municipality should have had its campaign, the way it’s normally done. I have never seen an organisation that doesn’t want to claim its gains,” one NWC member said.
“We have provided millions of houses, roads are tarred. An incumbent who continually goes out to apologise and talk about all these big things of investment… You don’t talk about refuse collection, nothing. This issue about profiling the president (Cyril Ramaphosa) over the ANC was a major setback. How do you not talk about the deliverables?”
The arrest of former president Jacob Zuma and the resignation of Zweli Mkhize have also been identified as possible reasons the party performed badly in Kwazulu-natal. The ANC leader said Ramaphosa’s statements about an attempted insurrection during rioting triggered by the Zuma arrest and ethnic mobilisation also hurt the ANC in the province.
Meanwhile in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, the party leaders said that nationalising the elections became the ANC’S Achilles heel.
One party leader said Ramaphosa
and the NEC should have used the likes of Mzwandile Masina to populate a message of what the ANC had done for the metros instead of highlighting governance weaknesses.
Another area that the NWC members identified as having contributed to the weakened campaign strategy was Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan. All the NEC members in the two factions that the M&G spoke to agreed that Gordhan would
need to be disciplined.
Mantashe alluded to this when he spoke to the media on Wednesday, saying that Eskom acted as the opposition of the ANC during the last leg of electioneering.
The NEC members said that the entire NEC will have to account for the poor showing.
On Monday the ANC appointed Jeff Radebe as chair of its coalitions committee and Andries Nel as its
secretary. The two Ramaphosa loyalists were tasked with speaking to smaller parties on possible coalitions. Radebe, who was dispatched to ethekwini to negotiate with the ANC in Kwazulu-natal about a possible coalition arrangement with the DA, was sent packing by provincial leaders.
In a meeting with the ANC’S top six on Tuesday evening, Radebe is said to have told the officials that
Kwazulu-natal was willing to work with the EFF.
“We cannot form a coalition with the DA, that would be madness. It’s better for us strategically if we go with the EFF. They are growing and making inroads in ethekwini. If we align with them, we have a much more seamless arrangement for the future,” one provincial executive committee member said.
An NEC member said it was a mistake to send Radebe to Kwazulu Natal: “He has no pull, no weight on that side. Even if he had a workable solution, it would have taken a lot of convincing. The person who should have gone there should have been Zweli Mkhize, Willies Mchunu and even Senzo Mchunu. They understand the land, they understand the community.”
Mantashe is said to have been putting out feelers with the DA’S federal council chair Helen Zille on a possible coalition that would result in the DA retaining Tshwane and possibly ethekwini while the ANC regains Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg.
While some within the Ramaphosa faction are said to be not opposed to this, some within the NWC have vowed to fight the move, saying it would be catastrophic ahead of 2024 general elections.
“We have to look at this politically. On the eve of elections the deputy secretary general [Duarte] came out to say the enemy of the ANC is the DA. What are we saying about the character of the ANC?” one said.
ANC leaders have argued that the party must become the opposition in some metros, with one NEC member saying while it might not be comfortable with this “it must learn”.
Malema is said to have already indicated to the top officials he will not wrestle for mayoral positions in councils. Malema told a media briefing on Thursday that the party would also be prepared to vote for a city government in return for an agreement to implement policies and programmes, rather than for positions. Malema said he was “the happiest man”’ that the ANC had been humbled by securing less than 50 % of the vote.
Sources with inside knowledge say EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu told Mashatile the EFF was willing to go into a coalition with the ANC provided the ruling party puts the section 25 land redistribution bill back on the table. The two parties could not agree on several issues including the EFF’S demand that the bill read “nationalisation” instead of “custodianship” and to make reference to “no compensation” for expropriated land instead of “nil compensation”. The governing party then stopped all negotiations.
Other non-negotiable demands from the EFF involve the insourcing of municipal employees.
“It’s going to be an interesting two weeks. We can talk to them. The only thing is that they are inconsistent. Interestingly they don’t want to take positions. They don’t want to own up. We might be in the era of coalitions but the maturity of political parties is not there,” one ANC leader said.
An NWC member said the committee would discuss legislating coalitions and that discussions must be localised and unpacked for each municipality.
DA leader John Steenhuisen seemed to be in agreement with the ANC on possible legislation of coalitions,
saying while the legislation at local level could not work, it would be a viable option.
“We have seen in nations like Kenya, these umbrella bodies that campaign as an umbrella coalition to unseat a government or to form a government. That may well be the future,” he said.
But Shivambu disagrees, saying legislating a coalition was tantamount to starting a new political party.
“There must never be any legislative regulation of the coalition. Now you are forming a political party once you legislate it. Coalitions must be that loose,” said Shivambu.
The ANC will likely start its formal discussions with the smaller parties before it can make any arrangements with the EFF. The Inkatha Freedom Party and the DA’S leaders have both said they will meet on the weekend to discuss coalition arrangements.
Nelson Mandela Bay
In Nelson Mandela Bay, where the DA and the ANC took 48 seats each, the Northern Alliance (NA), which garnered three seats, and other small parties aim to become the collective kingmakers. The parties were understood to be meeting on Thursday to consolidate their position and come up with a collective approach to the big parties in order to increase their bargaining power.
“We definitely want to be part of the government. We are the leaders of the second-tier parties. We are first going to consolidate on our side before we meet with the big parties in the afternoon,” an NA leader said. “There was an approach (from the DA and the ANC) but we told them to hold on a bit.”
Johannesburg
The Al Jama-ah Party, which is in a coalition with the ANC in the Johannesburg metro, is understood already to be on board to continue with the relationship in constituting
a new council. Leader Ebrahim Hendricks said the party had met with the ANC leadership, including Duarte, Mashatile and elections head Fikile Mbalula, and agreed to a post-election coalition agreement. However, this would require that the ANC kept the EFF within the existing coalition.
ethekwini
ANC’S vote slipped from 56% in 2016 to 42%. This is one of 21 hung councils in Kwazulu-natal, where the governing party lost councils to the DA, IFP and NFP.
The ANC leadership in the city has been left scrambling by the outcome and is unable to move ahead with coalition
talks until it gets the go-ahead to do so after the weekend’s NWC meeting.
“The situation is bad. We had anticipated a worse result than 2016 and 2019 but not to have performed this badly,” said a senior member of the ethekwini ANC caucus. The C-word is for coalitions, not centrism
In politics as in life, you should be careful what you wish for. At the very start of the local government election campaign, President Cyril Ramaphosa made a bold statement. If you don’t trust your councillor or you don’t think your municipality is doing a good job, then vote for someone else, was the gist.
This was a far, and welcome, cry from his predecessor’s preposterous claim that the ANC “will rule until Jesus comes”. Yet the faux humility that was the hallmark of the lacklustre ANC campaign that followed didn’t cut it with the electorate.
Either by boycotting the poll altogether, or by turning to a growing market of opponents — but mainly the former — voters have turned their backs on the ANC, ushering in a new period of even greater uncertainty and instability, but also opportunity.
At the centre of this shifting landscape sits coalition politics.
In 2017 I went to see the ANC’S chief whip, the late Jackson Mthembu, to talk about a new coalition politics initiative I was convening. I was far from certain that the ANC wanted to hear the “C-word”; I didn’t think it was ready to countenance the idea. I assumed that they would see it as a sign of weakness.
But, ever sage and reasonable, Jackson was welcoming of the idea. “Coalitions are going to be a big part of the future political landscape of this country,” was what he said.
And he was right. Just four years later, and it looks as though coalitions will be the defining feature of not just the next five years of local government, but of national and provincial politics for the foreseeable future.
The election delivered a double first. Not only did the ANC’S share of the vote across the country fall below 50% for the first time but turn-out was also less than half of registered voters, falling at least 10 percentage points from the last local elections in 2016.
This was a yellow card not just for the ANC but for the country’s electoral democracy. The alarm bells went off in 2019 when 25% of eligible voters did not bother to register. Of those nine-million people, six-million were “young” — aged 18-29.
This time almost a third of the 38.57-million eligible voters did not register to vote; so only three out of every 10 eligible voters actually voted on Monday.
This means that, in turn, in the many “hung” municipalities, including four of the eight metros, the biggest parties are hoping to form governments on the back of a “mandate” — if one can even apply that term in these circumstances — of less than 15% of the electorate.
This stretches government legitimacy to breaking point. It means that the burden on political leaders to constitute stable and sustainable coalitions is even greater. Ideally, those coalitions should not just be about securing the 51% combined majority needed to govern, but should attempt to include as many parties as possible, even though this will add to the complexity of the negotiations and the management of the coalitions.
Such has been the fragmentation, in many places it will not be possible for two parties to make it without a third or a fourth. In Johannesburg, for example, even if the ANC and the EFF wanted to get into bed together — and the ANC will approach such a deal with justified trepidation — they will not have won enough seats to get over the line together; they would need to find a third playmate.
This is perhaps the most remarkable feature of Monday’s outcome. While it was clear that none of the big three parties, the ANC, Democratic Alliance (DA) and Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) were in form in the run-up, it is still extraordinarily rare in electoral politics that both a dominant ruling party and its two biggest rivals would all suffer such disappointing results.
It creates an opening; the possibility emerges to offer a fresh, more diverse political platform.
But even this chink of light in an otherwise dismal scene is fraught with difficulty, not least because voters are being drawn away from the centre ground. When parties splinter off the ANC or DA and try to adopt central/rational positions they don’t succeed. Noisy populism is more likely to prosper, although EFF leader Julius Malema will be desperately disappointed with his party’s failure to gain any substantial ground.
Building coalitions with such potential partners will involve a lot of nose-holding. Who would want to break bread with this election’s break-out party, Actionsa? Its arrival on the scene indicates a further disintegration of the middle ground of politics, since Herman Mashaba — a kind of Donald Trump-lite — offers a toxic mixture of free market economic policies and xenophobic antiimmigrant rhetoric.
Like Trump, Mashaba is a transactional politician. When he was mayor of Johannesburg he asked the EFF what its price was for keeping him in power and, unsurprisingly, they opted for portfolios in City Hall that unlocked procurement “opportunities” for them. That was Mashaba’s trade, and one of the reasons why the DA subsequently spat him out.
Coalition-building is an art-form, and provides a test of political wit and leadership nous. The conventions that can under-gird stable coalitions can take decades to establish.
Germany is a case study in this regard. Its national election was on 26 September. Since then various parties have been testing the water with each other to decide, as a first stage, whether they even want to form a coalition.
Hence, it is only the last few days that the expected “traffic light” constellation of social democrats, liberals and greens have turned to phase two: figuring out the programmatic detail of their coalition deal, and working through the details of what will bind them during their time together in government.
There is no panic; instead, a careful and painstaking process of building the necessary trust and guard-rails to govern the coalition to ensure that it will not easily fall off the rails — like most of the new coalitions that formed in Tshwane, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay after the 2016 local government elections.
The stakes are very high for those locked in the negotiating rooms at the moment, and they face tricky political questions, such as, for the ANC: should it risk a deal with the volatile EFF or does it dare enter a “grand coalition” with a right-leaning DA? Different risks will need to be weighed in the balance, guided by strategic principles, such as: what is the most workable coalition partnership and which will provide the most stable and capable form of government?
Political leaders and their negotiating teams should not rush. They are tired, no doubt, from the campaign. They would be well advised to move slowly, testing the ground every step of the way. Residents of the towns and cities where they will govern have every right to expect that the new coalitions will not be entered into promiscuously and without careful forethought.
Otherwise it will likely be very messy.
This is the future — full of uncertainty and fluidity, but ripe with new possibilities. Even allowing for the fact that local government elections tend to have lower turnouts and are less forgiving of the ruling party, it is now more likely than not that the ANC will fail to secure a majority at the next national election in 2024.
This will give pause for thought for an awful lot of people inside the ANC, where it will provide ammunition to Ramaphosa’s opponents, who will seek to pin the psychologically significant drop beneath 50% onto their reform-minded president.
The 2016 result was a nail in Jacob Zuma’s coffin. It is unlikely to have the same direct negative impact on Ramaphosa, although the ANC is an even more unstable, divided and unpredictable organisation that it was five years ago.
Ramaphosa will have to impose his authority and insist that the result the ANC got is the result that it deserves after so many years of shoddy rule — otherwise he may lose his grip on power. The radical enonomic transformation gang are too weakened and inchoate to muster a serious challenge. But future pretenders, such as Deputy President DD Mabuza and his mate Paul Mashatile, will be watching closely. They will be mindful of the fact that there is little point in playing a long game if come the time of their coronation the ANC is no longer in power.
Their political calculus will focus on whether it is better to move now to install new leadership capable of restoring the ANC’S electoral mojo or to continue to back Ramaphosa as the best bet to rebuild public trust in a liberation movement that has so badly lost its way.
Almost a third of the 38.57-million eligible voters did not register to vote; so only three out of every ten eligible voters actually voted