Tony Leon: Why a humbled ANC still holds the coalition cards

For years, I’ve wanted Tony Leon to write for BizNews. Today he finally does. Few South Africans have watched our politics from as many vantage points: former DA leader, ambassador, author, and one of the GNU’s negotiators. His debut lands on the same day that South Africans vote in the local government elections. Tony borrows Abba Eban’s warning on the perils of analogy, then argues the counting is the easy part. A humbled ANC still holds the coalition cards. The DA has essentially one option. And if the ANC slams the metro doors? The GNU itself could wobble. So could the rand. Welcome aboard, Tony. - Alec Hogg.By Tony Leon*.Given Israel's inconclusive election result last week, it’s apt to quote one of its founding statesmen from a vanished age. Decades ago, Abba Eban warned of ‘the perils of analogy’. He advised that history is ‘baroque’ and does not admit of replication in most circumstances. Using the example of a red rubber ball and a shiny red apple, he said, “This apple is red, shiny and good to eat. This rubber ball is round, red and shiny. Therefore, there is at least a strong probability that it will be good to eat. “Last Tuesday, Israeli voters stripped longtime PM Bibi Netanyahu of his governing majority. But the election did not provide the opposition bloc with a clear path to governing bar controversially coalescing with the Arab parties, or hazarding the pitfalls of a minority government. Incautiously comparing the red ball to an apple, we face a similar outcome at home in Wednesday’s poll. And equal uncertainty after the votes in the local government election are counted. If the opinion polls are even vaguely correct, a much-weakened ANC will likely take second place in most metros to the DA. Ironically, only Cape Town will have an outright winner, and the DA will have no need for coalition partners. 20 years back it was Cape Town alone that delivered a hung metro – the ANC won outright majorities in the rest. How the mighty have fallen, etc. Yet even a humbled ANC does not necessarily usher DA Mayors into office in Johannesburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay. Nor even inaugurate an MK mayoralty in Durban. A simple but complicated reason explains this. Even with 40% of the votes in key metros, the only realistic path for the DA to create a stable administration is to coalesce with its electoral enemy and uneasy national governing partner, the ANC. In Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay, certainly, the preferred DA coalition partners (e.g. VF+ and ACDP) simply will not win enough seats to deliver a governing majority. In Tshwane, there is an outside possibility that the VF+ will provide the numbers, but since they are likely to cannibalise DA votes, this too is uncertain. The same polls that predict a stalemate also show voters’ preference for coalitions. Overwhelmingly, Action SA supporters, for example, favour their party coalescing with the DA -and vice versa. But Herman Mashaba and his outfit have little regard for democratic preferences. Their Joburg campaign has run on the fumes of Helen Zille hatred and selective amnesia on the key fact that Action SA co-governs in Gauteng metros courtesy of arrangements with the ANC and EFF. Precisely the same parties responsible for turning the once-dubbed ‘world-class African city’ into a rubbish dump, with no running water or reliable electricity.ANC voters also strongly favour governing arrangements with the DA - both nationally and locally. When the DA crashed in the 2019 elections, one of its senior leaders - who soon defected to Action SA - tried to rationalise the haemorrhaging of nearly half a million DA votes by describing it as ‘a winning loss’’That is useful shorthand for the position the ANC could find itself in post 4 November. Huge voter losses are unlikely to humble the party. In fact, it has several options for retaining its hold on power. Recently it has been furiously signalling that the DA is kryptonite. And this is not confined to the ‘usual suspects’ in the fractured ANC (such as Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi and his patronage cronies) but now includes secretary general Fikile Mbalula and apparently other members of its top 7 executives. .Read more:.TCS: ANC, DA face-off in metros as voter turnout hits new lows.Realistically, the ANC has several paths to retain its sclerotic grip on key metros: coalesce with the DA or forge agreements with its former members in EFF and MK, and/or bring back its current coalition partners and DA-haters, Action SA and Gayton Mackenzie’s PA.By contrast, unless a huge difference in turnout delivers big DA totals in the cities, or Mashaba parks his resentments, the party has basically a single option to create durable local arrangements: an all-metro deal with the ANC. The DA has, for good reason, explicitly closed the door on any deal with the EFF and MK, so its governing options shrink to essentially one choice. Of course, no word on any of this from President Cyril Ramaphosa. His silence is hardly Delphic. It’s a mix of chronic indecisiveness and eyeing the exit door. Pompey the Great reminded us that ‘far more people worship a rising than a setting sun.’ And CR is literally in the political twilight zone going forward. Of course, icing out the DA from mayoralties in the metros is hardly a cost-free exercise. It would be unsustainable for the DA to continue propping up the ANC in national government, where the current GNU was predicated on the fact and figures that the ANC received the most votes in the 2024 election, 40% and therefore could elect a president with DA votes. If the DA obtains the likely 40% vote on Wednesday in the three major metros outside Cape Town and Durban, it will remind the ANC of this fact and these figures. And presumably if the ANC dislikes the ‘perils of analogy’ (to reprise Abba Eban), it faces the prospect of the DA exiting the GNU or jumping out ahead of being pushed to make way for a reconfigured ANC-MK-EFF national government. I won’t dwell on how this will further the decline and perhaps signal the extinction of the ANC as a governing party. Of more interest and national peril is how ‘Mr Bond’ or the markets and currency will react to such a tie-up. The ANC recently heralded the improbable victory of its leftist ally Lula da Silva in Brazil. Yet immediately after his election, Brazil’s stock market crashed and the real slumped by 8% after the result was declared, its worst one-day fall in more than 25 years. As The Economist noted, “More significant investors are fleeing Brazil too.’.Read more:.John Matisonn: Coalition deals - Tshwane gives DA leverage.Will the ANC take heed? Very unlikely, given the nonchalance and petulance it displayed towards the US that led to our ejection from AGOA on Monday. Even as I write, the ANC and its satraps at the departments of trade, industry and competition are wrongly minimising. Still, like the unknown election outcome on Wednesday and the unknown result of the two-week horse trading afterwards, we could be surprised on the upside. Here’s hoping!.*Tony Leon led the Democratic Party and its successor, the Democratic Alliance, from 1994 to 2007. For eight of those years, he was Leader of the Opposition. He later served as South Africa’s ambassador to Argentina. In 2024, he was part of the DA team that negotiated the Government of National Unity..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. 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Tony Leon: Why a humbled ANC still holds the coalition cards

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