OPINION | First steps in South Africa’s new coalition game

South Africa’s coalition game 2024 is on! Informally, many of South Africa’s political parties have in the last few weeks informally approached one another in anticipation of failing and faltering results in Election 2024.

Given several authoritative opinion polls’ forecasts of lessened and sub-outright-majority electoral fortunes for especially the African National Congress (ANC), the need for a coalition government was not unexpected.

With the outlines of the national and provincial results now clear, based on reliable projections by the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), while the final counts are awaited, political parties have started springing into action.

They are starting to launch the formal part of the coalition formation process. So far, there is a twofold set of actions, as was evident on Friday at the Electoral Commission’s Results Operation Centre in Midrand.

First, the major parties are convening meetings of their own structures, the ones that will confirm the particular party’s approach to coalitions, namely whether they will enter into such dispensations with whom, under which preconditions, and in what format. Second, through communication with researchers (including myself) and some journalists, a few preliminary approaches have become evident.

At stake are South Africa’s national and three provincial governments. Coalition governments will be required in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Northern Cape. Of the rest of South Africa’s nine provinces three are set to host numerically safe ANC majority governments, Eastern Cape, Limpopo and the North West.

The ANC hung onto the Free State and Mpumalanga by small majorities. The Democratic Alliance (DA) is set to retain its outright majority in the Western Cape, by a very modest majority.

The ANC set its coalition ball rolling by getting consultative meetings going with its provincial structures. The different provinces requiring coalitions might require different approaches and might insist on different parties as partners, besides the fact that the election outcome in KwaZulu-Natal might even mean that the ANC is not included in the provincial government.

It will be possible to constitute a provincial government without the inclusion of the ANC. In addition, the ANC’s top structures, the top seven, the National Executive or Working Committee, either met on Friday or urgent meetings were being considered with a view to coalition deliberations.

The DA was convening a meeting of its Multi-Party Charter formation for Saturday and a meeting of its Federal Council for later in the weekend.

The uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party reported that Jacob Zuma was in Johannesburg for this party’s meeting, probably in relation to forming a coalition government in KwaZulu-Natal, where MK was the top performing party, albeit short of an outright majority.

The snippets of information imparted by the political parties in recent days included that the ANC would be hesitant to form coalition governments with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) due, for example, to the party’s inclination to make rash policy demands. With regard to MK, there is simply too much bad blood between the ANC and MK to even consider converging under the current leaderships.

MK also made it clear that its target (along the lines of a calculated chess game, which, they reminded me, was Zuma’s purported specialty) is to politically ‘take out’ Cyril Ramaphosa. Beyond that, said an MK person at the IEC centre, ‘there are no permanent enemies in politics’.

The ANC is also inclined to issue an open invitation to political parties to join it in a coalition, perhaps one that is reminiscent of a super-majority unity government. It assumes (if not hopes) that the MK and EFF will not be taking up the invitation. This type of initiative would help ensure that the ANC will not stand accused of entering an exclusive dispensation with a party that has policy and arguably ideological differences with the ANC.

This type of arrangement, while the ANC effectively rules as a minority government, is present in several local municipalities in South Africa (these arrangements are identified in the MISTRA Coalitions Barometer, 2021-23; find online).

This model would furthermore afford the opportunity for old and new small parties that are making it into the new National Assembly to join.

On the side of the DA, the speculation is that the DA will be more inclined to consider a so-called (and well-known in coalition literature and practice) ‘confidence and supply’ style of coalition with the DA than a formal inter-party coalition formation. Confidence and supply arrangements entail that parties simply agree to cooperate on crucial matters such as the passing of budgets, motions of no confidence, and possibly elections for offices.

The exact approach to coalition government formation that the EFF will be pursuing (after this party has ceded ground to MK in this week’s elections) is still to emerge.

EFF leader Julius Malema was reported by the SABC to be interested only in the Presidency of South Africa.

In the Northern Cape, one of South Africa’s local government coalition operator parties, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), has already indicated that it would be available to help the ANC in the province gain an outright majority. The PA and ANC co-govern in several local municipalities.

The party political moves outlined in this brief analysis are firmly in the context of ‘first steps’, which may be amended and elaborated as the national and provincial coalition processes take shape in the next few weeks. It will be safe to assume that the next week will be crucial.

The first session of parliament must be convened no longer than two weeks after the announcement of the election results.

If the results get formalised by Sunday, Monday, 17 June, will be D-Day for Parliament to sit and for the National Assembly to elect the new President of South Africa.

Parties will in all probability be unwilling to execute this constitutional duty unless some interparty agreement is in place.

Professor Susan Booysen, is a political analyst, Director of research at MISTRA, and visiting professor at the Wits School of Governance.