South Africa’s bickering opposition fractures ahead of national vote

South Africa’s opposition is turning on itself weeks before critical elections, adding fresh uncertainty to a vote that threatens to overturn the majority of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress.

Polls predict that the former liberation party’s vote share will fall below 50 per cent for the first time since the advent of democracy in South Africa, amid anger at high unemployment, rampant crime and corruption and a stagnant economy.

“We have a decaying ANC on the one hand, but no real vibrant opposition on the other,” said David Everatt, head of the University of Witwatersrand School of Governance.

Voter disenchantment with the ANC has provided fertile ground for a plethora of new parties on the May 29 ballot. But they are now clashing with established opposition rivals as they vie for votes and the chance to be coalition kingmakers.

Underscoring the tensions, opposition leader John Steenhuisen last week attacked “political opportunists in small parties” for competing with his Democratic Alliance for votes in its Western Cape heartland, the only South African province not run by the ANC.

“Instead of fighting to [win] the eight ANC provinces that have been smashed to pieces, the political mercenaries . . . are obsessed with trying to break the one DA province that works,” Steenhuisen said.

Songezo Zibi, leader of Rise Mzansi, a liberal newcomer that was one of Steenhuisen’s targets, said his party offered an alternative to swing voters “who are not loyal to the DA, they were upset with the ANC and still are”.

“They see us as a threat,” he said of the DA. “It ’s a sign . . . we’re bang on the money,” he told The Financial Times.

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South Africa’s proportional representation system has no formal electoral threshold for winning seats, making it viable for relatively small opposition parties to run on their own.

At the same time, competition for voters and donors also threatens to unravel a multi-party “moonshot” pact between the DA and nine other parties. Many have refused to exclude post-election talks with the ANC despite provisions in the alliance that rule out making such deals.

“It’s got nothing to do with friendship, it’s got nothing to do with trust,” ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba told a gathering in Cape Town last month about why he joined the moonshot pact. The priority was unseating the ANC, said Mashaba, a former DA official who quit the party to strike out on his own.

Ramaphosa’s party is playing on these divisions to present itself to voters as relatively stable. “A group who don’t even trust each other — there’s your coalition party,” Ronald Lamola, the ANC justice minister, said in response to Mashaba.

But analysts say the ANC itself is preparing to deal with these parties in the event that it loses its majority. A poll this week by the Johannesburg-based Social Research Foundation showed the party’s support plunging to 37 per cent, but much depended on whether voters can be convinced to come out on polling day.

“If the ANC come up at 46 or 47 per cent, there may be a number of smaller one per cent parties that they can use to stitch together a coalition in which they’re still the dominant force,” said Everatt. “But if they’re coming in the low 40s, it’s a kind of Rubicon mark.”

A weakened ANC could still seek to govern without its biggest opponents, but at the risk of deals with multiple small groups that are much more unstable. That would mean a hodgepodge of ideologically opposed parties could join a government facing huge pressure to turn around crippling service delivery failures at home.

“If the ANC dips below 45 per cent, we’re in trouble,” said Ziyanda Stuurman, senior analyst for Africa at the Eurasia Group think-tank. “Likely they will then depend on a multitude of smaller parties and eventually the wheels will come off in that kind of coalition.” 

Many fear that recent chaotic pacts in some of South Africa’s biggest cities will be replicated at a national level. Johannesburg has been beset with deepening service delivery problems since the ANC lost control of the city in local elections in 2021.

The country’s largest city has endured a series of volatile power-sharing agreements that have churned out six mayors in three years. Similar revolving doors have played out in the Western Cape and Ekhuruleni region outside Johannesburg. 

“Any other party that joins the ANC is going to have its work cut out,” said Ayesha Omar, a political lecturer at the University of Witwatersrand. “In some ways it’s a poisoned chalice.”

If the ANC’s vote share falls far enough that it needs to negotiate with its larger rival parties, it could look towards the radical Economic Freedom Fighters, who advocate sweeping state nationalisation and the expropriation of land without compensation.

Its leader, the firebrand Julius Malema, has cited control of the national treasury as a condition of backing the ANC to continue in government.

In KwaZulu-Natal, the country’s Zulu heartland and an ANC stronghold, both the Inkatha Freedom party and former president Jacob Zuma’s new uMkhonto weSizwe party, which are also peeling votes from the ruling party, could become coalition kingmakers.