COALITIONS AS GOVERNANCE, NOT CONTEST Professor Susan Booysen, editor of Marriages of Inconvenience: The politics of coalitions in South Africa (2021, MISTRA), explores the challenges, shortcomings and possibilities of coalitions (ANC) and its precarious, jagged-line decline from one-party dominance is at the core of the uncertainty. Is South Africa in an irreversible transition from one-party dominance to a system in which coalitions or a balance between various parties of roughly equal strength, rule? Does the ANC retain chances to continue reversing its electoral fortunes, especially when opposition politics are fragile and hence dispense with the need for more coalitions?
POLITICAL BATTLES
Professor Susan Booysen
C
oalitions in government need to be treated as a necessary form of co-operative interparty governance when electorates do not grant any single party an outright majority. As recent South African experience has demonstrated, it is a difficult form of government to manage. Yet, with minimal effort, more is possible. Authorities and political parties need to find the political, cultural and legislative mechanisms to bring in respectability and professionalism that will displace the political circus that coalition politics in South Africa has become, especially since the local elections of 2016. This analysis explores factors that affect coalition governments generally and the lessons South Africans may draw from global and local experiences.
COALITIONS ARE HERE TO STAY Coalitions are part of the future in South Africa’s multiparty democracy, even if there will be – as in the country’s post-1994 past – an ebb and flow. Across South Africa’s four sets of local government elections from 2000 to 2016, the total number of coalitions ranged between 27 and 33. While it is impossible to predict the next number, following South Africa’s pending local elections, coalitions will persist while political parties are in flux. The African National Congress
Party politics in South Africa tend to be as much about intraparty as interparty contests. The result is that many a prime political battle rages within the ANC, rather than in competitive interparty politics.
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VOICE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT
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Party politics in South Africa tend to be as much about intraparty as interparty contests. The result is that many a prime political battle rages within the ANC, rather than in competitive interparty politics. In this factional contest, President Cyril Ramaphosa stands strong: he is in command of government and has consolidated his power in the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Yet, there are relentless assaults on him and his camp, often waged by those who have much to lose in the anticorruption and capture battles. Yet, through populist appeals, they retain disruptive power, as evidenced especially in KwaZulu-Natal in July 2021. Hence it is literally in “the final instance” that political contests reach the electoral domain and get manifested in coalitions. When they do and as South Africa’s metropolitan coalitions of 2016–2021 have shown, coalitions councils often became the sites of chaotic, immature and unaccountable governance. (The reports of the AuditorGeneral do indicate that such governance is common far beyond coalition councils, but coalitions elevate the prospects.) For South Africa’s future coalitions to be sites of co-operative and developmental governance, party politicians need new mindsets: coalition governance needs to be the site of interparty resolve to effect sound governance rather than party political prowess. The recent practice of coalitions as
ISSUE 36
2021/09/30 11:50 AM
