Will the May 29 elections be quite the watershed moment everyone expects?

By: Stef Terblanche

With a view to the 29 May elections, three leading recent opinion surveys have pegged support for the African National Congress (ANC) at 40% or below. This suggests the ANC will lose power, which immediately brings up the question of coalition governments at national level and in several provinces. Hence, the question everybody is currently asking is, with which other party or parties will the ANC conclude a coalition deal to be able to remain a governing party.

Most commentators view the 2024 election as likely to mark a pivotal moment in South Africa’s 30-year-old democratic history and one that will decisively change the political landscape. Such a notion is not quite new though – in our 30 years of democracy we have previously seen such “watershed” moments that altered   the political landscape: in 2007 when Jacob Zuma replaced Thabo Mbeki as ANC leader soon to become president, and again in 2014 when Julius Malema and his radical, populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) emerged as South Africa’s third biggest political party after their noisy breakaway from the ANC. And the ANC’s 2017 National Conference through to the 2019 elections was also supposed to be such a moment of change on the back of Cyril Ramaphosa’s promise of “a new dawn” which never materialised.

And so, here we are again at another anticipated pivotal moment of change, with South Africans seemingly fixated on the idea of an ANC election defeat, driven by opinion polls and embellished by opposition politicians. But some sobering questions arise that challenge this widely shared opinion that the ANC is about to exit from the political centre stage.

Admittedly, since the advent of democracy in 1994 the ANC has never seemed weaker than now. But, at the time of writing we were still a month away from the 29 May elections, and as the ANC’s election machinery facilitated by control of state resources kicks into top gear for the final month of campaigning, there are a number of factors that could possibly still improve the party’s election chances.

With that in mind, the question arises whether this election will indeed be the watershed one? Or will the real change for better or for worse only come in 2029, with this election merely being the precursor setting in motion the processes that will ultimately lead us to that? Have we really reached the moment where South Africa will transition from30 years of largely destructive one-party-dominant rule by a fading erstwhile liberation movement to a more diverse and inclusive governing coalition of several parties? Or have we reached the point where the ruling ANC will be shown the door, a fate that has befallen numerous African “liberation parties” before? Or will it stubbornly cling to power, perhaps by hook or by crook? For the answers we will have to wait until after 29 May but there’s no harm in interrogating the factors that could alter the current popular narrative.

Although the opinion surveys have recorded a steady downward trend in ANC support over the last year, and previous elections and recent by-elections tend to support this trend, it’s by no means a foregone conclusion that the ANC will be ousted from power just yet. It could still manage to scrape home and remain the sole ruling party at national level, with varying possibilities in the provinces. And even if its support fell not too far below 50%, it will still find itself in government as the dominant party in a governing coalition. For more significant change to kick in, the ANC’s support on 29 May must fall below 45%. That’s when one or more of the other big parties will get a real bite at power, setting the stage for what may come when we return to the polls in 2029.

Will the opinion polls be proven right?

Currently this possibility of the ANC remaining in power is the wild card in the pack, the outside chance, but it’s definitely still there. First, one should reasonably question the accuracy or reliability of the opinion surveys. We all know how in 2016 the opinion polls got it horribly wrong both before the Brexit referendum in Britain and the election of Donald Trump as US president.

In South Africa, with a view to the national provincial elections on 29 May, the local opinion polls have often over the past year come up with widely differing results, with one particular poll still showing ANC support at 51% earlier this year, and now having adjusted it right down to below 40%. That’s an unlikely swing of more than 11% in just three months. In six of the most recent surveys, support for the ANC varied from 48% down to 37% – again a big variance, so, which one do you believe?

The different surveys also use different methodologies, different sample sizes, different and differently structured questions, and different anticipated voter turnouts (which will have an impact on the election results). Most surveys are no longer conducted in person or door-to-door but are done via cellphones, which arguably may exclude a large representative proportion of people from the sample surveyed because they have no cellphone access for a variety of reasons. That will surely undermine accuracy.

One good example of this phenomenon in action is how the polls have been suggesting – they don’t like the word predicting – that the Democratic Alliance (DA) will remain in power in the Western Cape, possibly with a relatively small loss of support. The Patriotic Alliance (PA) of Gayton McKenzie hardly featured in these polls. But when you look at recent municipal by-election results, the PA has been making serious inroads in DA country – McKenzie’s appeal to the coloured community that their time has come after being sidelined respectively by both the apartheid and ANC/DA regimes, seems to have found a responsive audience not picked up by the opinion polls. Afterall, their grievances of neglect are real, and McKenzie is from that community, speaks its language with all its dialectical nuances and coding, and shares their concerns, speaking convincingly to this constituency in ways that a Steenhuisen, Malema or Ramaphosa could never do, the essence and impact of which can easily be missed by a ‘scientific’ opinion poll.

McKenzie is no fool and has done his homework, reaching out also to another DA constituency, the Afrikaner community – note his visit to Orania and interactions with various Afrikaner groups and leaders. He wants to capitalise on the fact that the DA already started losing Afrikaner support in the Western Cape and Gauteng to the Freedom Front Plus (FF+) and other small parties in the elections of 2019 and 2021, if not to bolster his own party then to weaken the DA and elevate the PA to the role of kingmaker.

After the DA stubbornly excluded the PA from the Multi-Party Charter (MPC) group of opposition parties it leads, McKenzie has promised that it’s payback time. And if McKenzie’s efforts and the recent by-election results in the Western Cape, plus popular sentiment in this province’s majority coloured community with its large Muslim component over the fate of Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza are anything to go by, payback could mean the DA losing control of the province and being forced into a coalition arrangement with smaller parties such as the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). And McKenzie and his PA will also be waiting in the wings.

Similarly, none of the polls or political pundits saw Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe Party (MKP) coming. Like McKenzie’s assault on the DA, Zuma too is out to exact revenge from Cyril Ramaphosa and the ANC over what he views as their unfair treatment of him. And that could come in the form of the MKP seriously diluting ANC support in KwaZulu-Natal and becoming a key partner in a provincial governing coalition, while it could possibly do the same at national level. There is a Machiavellian lesson to learn from all of this: don’t isolate your political enemies but keep them close and never underestimate the power of wounded egos in politics. However, for now it would be prudent to keep a question mark over the various opinion surveys and their tentative suggestions towards a possible outcome on May 29.

How can the ANC still rescue itself?

The ANC is known for effectively kicking its election campaigns into top gear only in the last month before polling often with good results – which is exactly what it is doing right now. Since shortly before Freedom Day on April 27, the ANC and its leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, aggressively launched the party’s final offensive for the month of May. Ramaphosa speaks confidently of the ANC winning and remaining in power – is this just campaign bluster or is he and his fellow ANC leaders hiding something they know, and we don’t?

At a recent meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) the ANC’s battle plans were laid out in detail – in a leaked audio recording the ANC election campaign boss seemed confident the party could again capture the 10 million votes that gave it 57.5% of the seats in Parliament in 2019, but Ramaphosa demanded they aim for 14 million instead. However, Ramaphosa also raised concerns over signs of lacklustre campaigning in some areas – most likely that is or has been rapidly addressed.

Nonetheless, his demand was followed up by he himself campaigning door-to-door in Soweto – something the ANC is very good at and always utilises with good effect in the very last stretch of every election campaign. In similar vein the big guns, cabinet ministers and party leaders, were unleashed on townships around the country; past presidents are being roped in, with Thabo Mbeki leading and Kgalema Motlanthe likely to join him, despite their past criticisms of their own party; and government funds and resources are seemingly starting to be used for ANC campaign advertising, events and transport, much to the chagrin of the opposition DA. The food parcels, T-shirts, organised transport, and other handouts, plus promises of houses and better local services, will surely follow.

The DA has lodged a complaint with the Public Protector accusing the ANC of “manipulating the public purse to pay for the ANC’s election campaign”. This, the DA says, would be done via a series of public relations exercises and paid media advertisements promoting state projects and governance where the ANC has governed over the last 30 years. This is indeed what was discussed at the recent ANC NEC meeting. Included in this strategy is a directive to tend to specific service delivery failures days ahead of ANC campaign visits, to create the illusion of efficient state delivery by the ANC government.

However, is this really such a surprise or is not something that ruling parties everywhere seem to do? In apartheid South Africa the then ruling National Party had perfected the art. Ramaphosa has indeed directed the NEC and his ministers to use their government departments to focus strongly on highlighting the claimed achievements and successes of the ANC over the past 30 years… a strategy he first employed in his state-of-the-nation-address in February with his story about Tintswalo, the so-called child of democracy. Critics should have seen it coming.

The ANC are masters of such deception and persuasion at election time. The party has a significant and well-oiled election machinery and tried and trusted strategies, while it recently seemed to have augmented its funds after initially being under pressure. Some suggest the sources of this are abroad among the ANC’s many authoritarian and radical new friends on the international geopolitical stage. Be that as it may, none of these developments and how potential voters are being influenced or responding to them, will have been picked up in the opinion polls to date. And that could well still make a difference and possibly arrest the ANC’s losing trend in the polls.

The question therefore is, will all of this persuade the multitude of disillusioned voters to again support the ANC? The same opinion surveys that have stacked the losing odds against the ANC, have also indicated that while their respondents blame the ANC for things in the country having broken down and going in the wrong direction, the majority still feel the ANC is most effective at governing. The DA comes in a fairly close second, about 6 to 8 percentage points behind. Yet in another survey anomaly, there seems to be almost equal support among voters for a future coalition that excluded the ANC and an ANC-DA coalition, but with a possible coalition between the ANC and the EFF also coming in not too far behind as the third most popular option. The latter option is one that three of the latest opinion polls seem to support very strongly, but we’ll return to that in a moment.

There are other factors too that could benefit the ANC. For one, the recent highly publicised corruption charges brought against the former defence minister and Speaker of Parliament Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, could help reduce criticism that the ANC is doing nothing about corruption and failing to prosecute its own. And the recent continuous and fairly long run of electricity provision without loadshedding interruptions, could also soften criticism on that front. Both are big election issues. It’s likely that Ramaphosa or one of his ministers may also still pull some rabbit from his or her hat on the jobs front in days to come – another pressing, perhaps the most pressing, election issue.

Furthermore, the ANC has over the past year or two steadily implemented a programme of increasingly radicalising or fast-tracking left-leaning policy and legislative content within its economic focus, but also in other spheres such as the National Health Insurance (NHI) and the expansion of student funding at tertiary level. This is a response to the demands of both a more militant and radical segment of the youth – the largest potential voting bloc – and those of a broader economically marginalised segment of society for radical economic transformation. It is the same demand on which parties like the EFF and Zuma’s MKP have successfully capitalised and continue doing so.

And then there is the massive population segment – about 50% or 27.3 million people – who rely on some or other form of social grants from government, something the ANC has carefully nurtured. The ANC government’s very recent extension – timed well to come just before the elections – of the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress Grant (SRD Grant) until March 2025, and the plans it is dangling before the electorate to possibly make this grant a permanent one, will not have gone unnoticed by this captive audience, particularly in light of ANC warnings that voting for a potential new government could lead to the loss of these grants.

The ANC government’s recent actions on the international relations front will also not have gone unnoticed at home, particularly its bringing of genocide charges against Israel in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). That speaks directly to the heart of a major domestic electoral segment made up of a large and often militant-leaning youth sector, a progressive and usually more progressive urban constituency, and the significant Muslim religious communities of the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng plus the many who support their pro-Palestinian cause. Then of course there are the habitual United States haters who will also be pleased – an unproven generalisation I know, but you nonetheless pick it up in many places.

A radical leftist or moderate centrist coalition?

So, in the event that the ANC manages to cling to power on May 29, whether by scraping home with a fragile majority or by ending up as the dominant party in a national coalition government, it will be a sobering wake-up moment for the ANC and will set in motion the processes that will most likely lead to more significant political change in the 2029 election.

At this juncture, having seen how it has self-destructed and nearly got relegated to history, the ANC will seriously look at ways to reinvent itself and structure governance and policies in ways that will secure its own future. This will mean the ANC will either go the moderate centrist route, clean up its act and introduce more balanced and liberal policies aimed at turning the economy around and addressing poverty, unemployment and all the other things on which it failed in the past. Or it may opt for the more radical route to the left, a position from where with its radical leftwing partners it may pursue more centralised authoritarian rule with the underlying aim of entrenching itself/themselves in a position of more permanent rule, and not necessarily by democratic means.

The ANC itself says it has not considered forming a coalition as it believes it can win again. So no clues there. But if the ANC loses its monopoly on power with a small margin, it will most likely partner with small parties that it can dominate. If its support drops below 45% as the most recent opinion polls suggest, it will be forced to consider the larger DA/MPC on the centre-right, or the EFF and MKP on the left as coalition partners – options that is also supported by the numbers in the latest opinion polls. There are of course a few other possible coalition permutations, but they will mostly bring together highly disparate parties in a very dysfunctional government and are probably not being considered at the moment.

Forget about the previous assertions by political parties on both sides of the spectrum that they would never work with the ANC. When it comes to the horse-trading for a slice of the power after May 29, all previous odds, preconditions and objections will be off the table. An entirely new ballgame will have started in which anything will be possible. However, under prevailing circumstances, the smart money would be on a leftwing coalition being formed if it’s up to the ANC– which will be a better fit for the ANC’s existing ideology, policies and international relations. This will also be a passport to the authoritarian, entrenched-power scenario. If it opted for a coalition in the centre-right with the moderate DA and/or MPC, the ANC would have to tone down or even radically alter its current ideology, policy and geopolitical offering – and that would probably be a bridge too far, even for a party with its back against the wall.

Stef Terblanche is a Cape Town-based political analyst and journalist. His opinions are his own and not necessarily those of the DDP.