Living with reality – and making it work

By: Steven Friedman

THERE are more effective ways of dealing with a problem than telling it to go away.

On the campaign trail a few days ago, President Ramaphosa, for not the first time, denounced coalitions. He said the ANC would avoid them because parties went into them only to serve themselves, not the public.

At first glance, this does not seem worth a comment. Governing parties – including those who govern provinces or municipalities – always want to govern on their own. One way of trying to achieve this is by warning voters of all the problems they will create for themselves by not supporting the largest party. It is a standard campaign theme of every party trying to avoid governing with others.

But the President is not the only public figure in this country to denounce coalitions – it is almost compulsory these days to insist that they are a blight on democracy. They are blamed for a host of ills – such as the fact that some Johannesburg suburbs lack water now. Coalitions are becoming politics’s equivalent of load shedding, something on which everything which goes wrong is blamed.

Coalitions do still have their admirers – but they tend to be smaller parties which would get seats in government from them. Since the supporters represent less people, most of what we hear about coalitions is negative.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, because most of the public debate misunderstands what coalitions are and so creates false problems and proposes false solutions. And because coalitions are sure to become a feature of this country’s political landscape, so we need to get used to them and make them work.

Not Just an Option

The most obvious point about coalitions is that they are not, as many of their critics and even some of their admirers seem to think, a new political idea which we are free to accept or reject. They happen not because anyone wants them but because no-one can avoid them. If no party wins enough seats to form a government, parties need to get together to assemble a majority. It is a product of arithmetic, not policy choice.

That makes the debate over whether coalitions are good for us entirely pointless, a bit like arguing whether reality is good for us.

Of course, coalitions are optional – parties can stay out of them and the President did suggest that the ANC may prefer to sit on the opposition benches to serving in a coalition. But, in the real world, politicians faced with a choice between serving in a government or becoming the opposition usually insist that their parties serve in government. Ramaphosa has been condemning coalitions for at least four years and, during that time, his party has served in quite a few of them.

More importantly, there may be cases in which public opinion would insist that parties form coalitions. This is likely if no-one can form a government, which would be possible here if the largest party does stay out of coalitions.

This is not an academic issue – it may face this country in less than three months’ time.

It is hardly new to point out that the governing party may not win a majority in this election. But, even if it does very badly, it will the biggest party with at least 40% of the vote. If it does not form a coalition – either because it does not want to or, as has happened in some local governments, because no party which is big enough to give the ANC and its partners a majority wants to govern with it – a government could be formed only if opposition parties can assemble a majority.

But, given the divisions between some of these parties, this is not very likely: to name names, it would at the least require the Democratic Alliance and the Economic Freedom Fighters to work together, which would be deeply humiliating for both parties since the DA has branded  the EFF ‘Public Enemy Number One.’ Since both might prefer not to be humiliated, we could then find that no-one can form a government.

Public opinion is unlikely to like this and we can expect the grumbling about coalitions to end very quickly if it happens. It is safe to predict that, within days, most of those who now denounce coalitions would be yelling at the politicians to form one quickly so that the country would have a government. It seems likely that anti-coalition politicians would change their tune quickly to avoid being accused of selling out the country.

Even if all this does not happen in this election, it will almost certainly happen in the next. This country’s party politics has been odd for 30 years because the electoral system we use almost always produces coalitions. The only reason it did not happen here is that one party had an unusually large share of the vote. It is losing a large chunk of that vote and so the system is beginning to work as it does just about everywhere else. The days when coalitions were avoidable here are ending.

The Real Problem

Given this, it would seem more useful to stop condemning the inevitable and to figure out why there is a problem with coalitions here and how it could be fixed.

The most important problem with coalitions here is, sadly, not one which can be easily fixed. The largest party’s vote share is declining but no party is gaining at its expense enough to get anywhere near forming a government. In the ANC’s worst-ever performance, in 2021, it still received more than double the votes of the second biggest party, the DA, and more than four times that of the third biggest, the EFF.

This has meant that, when no one party wins a majority, the ANC’s rivals find it hard to form a government because they are so short of 50% that the only way they can get there is to bring together a large number of parties. This is unstable because small parties know they can end the coalition and so they keep demanding more from it and may jump ship anyway if they are offered more from its opponents.  The most stable coalition would therefore be one formed by the ANC – because it would need much fewer parties – but opposition parties fear they would lose support if they hooked up with the ANC and so these coalitions are hard to come by.

None of this happens because anyone is to blame – voters are entitled to vote for whoever they want and parties are entitled to govern with whoever they want. But that makes the problem harder to fix because nothing we could reasonably ask anyone to do would solve it.

But this does not mean the country is doomed to endure self-serving coalitions which fall apart easily, at least until party support changes, because there is nothing anyone can do about it. Even within the limits imposed by reality, coalitions here would work much better if the most important people in a democracy, the voters, were taken more seriously by parties, or if voters insisted that parties listen to them.

A notable feature of coalition politics here is the parties’ total disregard of the people who voted for them. Parties never try to find out who their voters want them to govern with or what they want the coalition to do – they don’t even seem to bother to ask their active members given that, in  Ekurhuleni, the local branch of one of the major coalition partners issued repeated statements saying that they wanted nothing to do with this arrangement.

If parties paid more attention to giving voters what they want from coalitions, we might have less of the self-serving dealing we see now, more attention to what a coalition wants to achieve and which partners are most likely to enable it to achieve it. And voters could play a role in ensuring that coalitions say what they plan to do in detail, rather than, as they do now, simply offering  platitudes about serving the people.

Voters who do get more of a say may help by explaining to the bigger parties that they need their coalition partners and so ought to respect them. This seems obvious but isn’t – at least one of the major parties is repeatedly accused by its coalition partners of belittling them, which has collapsed some of its coalitions.

It also would help coalitions if the parties thought a little about whether their choice of head of government is one with which most voters agree– in some municipalities, it almost certainly isn’t.These are only a few ideas – there are many more. But they show where the discussion needs to

The question is not whether the country will have coalitions but whether those it will have will serve the people. It is time for the people to start telling the coalition partners what they want rather than resigning themselves to living with what the parties want.

Prof Steven Friedman is a research professor at the University of Johannesburg, faculty of humanities, politics department, and writes in his personal capacity.