The idea of a DA/ANC Coalition
The DA makes their stance explicit.
Solly Msimanga has recently outlined the DA’s longstanding, but until now private position, that they plan to engage the ANC for a grand coalition after the 2024 elections.
It wouldn’t be the first time the DA has engaged in this sort of political approach - in fact, it is a rather traditional strategy to preserve the English Liberal institutional culture of the Union as the dominant model. The DA is the direct institutional descendent of Jan Smuts's South African Party, which swallowed the original NP to become the UP. As the UP fell apart, its fragments, the Progressive Federal Party and the New Republic Party, formed the DP with NP dissidents in 1989.
Governments of national unity are the only reliable way to get these ideas into government, since no majority in any racial group is particularly amenable to these ideas. At the moment, the reason the DA receives votes is that they are not the ANC - they are far more competent, far less racist, and far less corrupt. But the voters are not progressive liberals, while much of the party is.
This is something I think they often forget.
As I have argued in the past on both Politicsweb and Biznews, as well as here on this blog, an ANC-DA coalition would not only be extremely foolish, but detrimental to any future resistance against black national-socialism (EFF/RET). I received a rebuke from Helen Zille for this stance, in which she insisted that the DA would never enter into a coalition with the ANC “in its current form”.
Unfortunately, as Zille and the rest of the party leadership see it, such a coalition is an existential matter, and seizing control of the state in 2024 is mandatory, in order to reverse a terminal decline and rescue what is left of the institutions which their ancestral incarnation, Smuts’s SAP, established.
This makes the form of the ANC they would hypothetically enter into coalition with largely irrelevant – they see no other option. That leaves them with nothing to bargain with (or at least nothing that would be visible to the public), and leaves the ANC with the EFF to bargain with. They hold all the cards.
Recently, Martin van Staden put it more succinctly – such a coalition would result in the DA being swallowed up and disappearing just as the NP did in the 1990s. I have argued something stronger – namely that the destruction of the DA’s credibility as an opposition party would be destroyed overnight, as would the ANC’s credentials as a majoritarian populist party, resulting in a massive shift of votes to the EFF, who would then achieve the inevitable, only five years later (or less, if past ANC presidential terms are anything to go by), and with a far greater mandate.
But Martin has offered a soft option to the DA which, while seductive in its sophistication, is unlikely to be perceived by the electorate in the light which Martin shows it. He argues that the DA should avoid a coalition, but adopt a “confidence and supply” strategy – supporting an ANC minority government by blocking any votes of no confidence from the EFF.
Fundamentally, what the DA’s new public position, and Martin’s thoughtful, yet (in my opinion) mistaken strategy have in common, is that they will both be perceived by the bulk of the voter base in the same way – the ANC’s base will see a compromise with minority interests which justifies the worst of the WMC conspiracy theories, and the DA’s voters will see collusion with a criminal and racist enterprise.
The only way a DA-ANC coalition could save South Africa, is if it enacted a state of emergency, and eradicated all black-nationalist opposition, such that it can make no comeback. Without such a drastic manoeuvre, the victory of these forces are inevitable, as eventually the electoral cycle rolls round to unseat incumbents.
As it stands, the DA runs another risk, which is that they are in danger of losing their majority in the Western Cape, due to the PA and the VF Plus eating away their Coloured and Afrikaans voter bases. If they publicly offer a deal with the ANC approaching the polls, their voter base will rebuke them. This will almost certainly cost them their 2021 3.4% majority.
In order to secure an ANC coalition, the DA will be forced to accept one in the WC as well, whether with the ANC or the VF Plus. In the latter case, they will be forced to accept a referendum on Cape independence. In the former case, they will be forced to let the ANC destroy all the DA has managed to preserve.
The final option for minorities to protect themselves will fall to the use of a tax revolt, to force the ANC to the bargaining table for sweeping reforms. The success of such a campaign will rest on the DA at least tacitly endorsing it. But out of their interest in attaining state power, it must affirm its authority, and cannot entertain such a radical action.
This means that any option for forestalling the Zimbabwefication of South Africa will rest on the capacity for military violence, a situation too nightmarish to contemplate.
The calculus is undeniable – South Africa’s decline and transformation is ineluctable if one resorts to parliamentary politics alone, and without accepting Cape independence or a tax revolt as an option, whether de facto (local autonomy) or de jure (full sovereign independence), the DA will have destroyed South Africa, and itself.
If the DA do not come to their senses and embrace the alternatives available to them, they will dash the country on the rocks.
Fortunately for them, they will always have foreign career options, as many of their former members have shown in recent years, by emigrating to the UK and elsewhere.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, such options are not universally available.
The worst of this is the sense of betrayal their current coalition partners feel - the hardline language the DA has used regarding ANC coalitions in the metropoles has now been shown to be hollow - the criticisms of the smaller “wild dog” parties now seems less of a cogent criticism of coalition politics in a PR constituency, and more of an attempt to sideline ideological competition.
Ultimately, this move will break any trust and hope people have in party democracy.
But considering the strength of the institutional alternatives in Afriforum/Solidariteit, OUTA and Sakeliga (among others), and the wind that it will place in the sails of the independence movement, perhaps that is for the best.
