ANC’s death spiral: Suicide by ideology, not voter betrayal - Hermann Pretorius

Key topics:.ANC vote share collapses from 70% in 2004 to 30% in 2025Party rejects reform, doubles down on NDR and race-based policiesOnce rewarded for pragmatism, ANC now writes its own obituary.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 at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Hermann Pretorius*.Political parties that dominate a society for decades tend to assume their grip will last indefinitely. Yet history shows how quickly power can crumble.In the 1988 Canadian parliamentary elections, the Progressive Conservatives won a substantive 43% of the vote, enough to govern with in the Canadian system. One election cycle later, in 1993, the party crashed to a mere 16%. It never recovered, folding into a new merger party in 2003.The ANC now stands before a similar abyss. After thirty years in power, its vote share collapsed from the peak of 70% in 2004 to just 40% in 2024. 2025 IRR and other polling, and analysis of by-election results by Dawie Boonzaaier, point to an ANC with 30% national support. In a recent conversation with Mike Sham on the State of the Nation podcast, Frans Cronje pointed out how an ANC which imploded in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal may have no feasible path to party coherence, never mind recovery.Facing extinction, the usual expectation in nature and politics is some fightback spirit kicking in – a will to survive. What has been remarkable about the ANC’s first post-majority year since 1994 is the extent to which the party has shown no survival instinct. Not even the cynical self-preservation of the career politician seems detectable.Faced with the risk of its total demise, the ANC’s rational post-2024 strategy could have been to take stock and look back for inspiration to when it dominated the political landscape: the 2004 national election.Housing, electricity, access to water, job creation, fiscal prudence, economic growth. On the back of strong trends on these issues, the ANC defied the unspoken rule of democratic politics across the globe: that a decade of incumbency rarely affords the party in power a chance to grow support.Rewarding the partyAnd yet, this is precisely what the ANC did in 2004 – the voter rewarding the party with 69.7% of the vote.Fiscal discipline, inflation targeting, and an openness to global trade helped stabilise the country economically, allowing unemployment to decline and social policy to improve. The material circumstances of ordinary South Africans improved sufficiently for them to vote ANC en masse.While patronage networks were already spreading, they had not yet hollowed out the state to the point of collapse. Growth was healthy, confidence was tangible, and optimism about the country’s prospects was common.Yet, what followed the 2004 triumph was a steady abandonment of its previous position, in favour of an increasingly unpopular and in many ways alien ideological dogma. The National Democratic Revolution (NDR), reduced in overt potency before the 2004 vote, roared back. Black Economic Empowerment was expanded from narrow deals into a system that distorted investment, procurement, taxation, and hiring at almost every level.Employment equity policies gained speed, resuscitating the racial categories of the repealed Population Registration Act of 1950. Cadre deployment became entrenched, turning state institutions into vehicles for loyalty and patronage. Instead of reforming state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the ANC bled them dry, subjecting them to race-rigged transformational targets instead of operational delivery targets.Effects were undeniableBy the time South Africans went to the polls in 2024, the effects were undeniable. Load-shedding, ever-increasing as voting day neared, was crippling industry and daily life. Youth unemployment locked millions out of opportunity. Middle-class taxpayers were voting with their feet or their wallets, taking their earnings abroad. Investors spoke with platitudinous reverence in public, but were downscaling or withdrawing in practice.In the mind of South Africans, the ANC, the formidable organisation that had spent almost a century carving itself into a political behemoth, had become little more than a machine for redistribution without production and promises without delivery. And voters punished it accordingly.This moment of reckoning could have served as a turning point. The fall from 70% in 2004 to 40% in 2024 ought to have spurred reflection. The example of what had happened to once-dominant parties like Canada’s Progressive Conservatives − how quickly support can collapse once voters turn away − should have been a chilling warning.Yet the ANC has shown, at most, rhetorical homage to the 2004 political case for voting ANC. Even in the final weeks of the election campaign, according to the groundbreaking SRF tracking poll, the ANC gamble on President Ramaphosa signing the NHI into law cost the party 6 percentage points when the votes were counted.Since then, the party has chosen to treat its loss of majority not as a signal to change course, but as a reason to accelerate down the same NDR road that had alienated close to 43% of its 2004 support base. Instead of recognising that its brief era of pragmatic policy once earned overwhelming support, it has decided to entrench its ideological agenda more deeply.BlossomedNew employment-equity quotas, more aggressive BEE plans, more rigid race-rigged regulations, race-based access to resources like water, and the Expropriation Act allowing property seizure below market value: all of these have blossomed as ANC policies since the party’s majority loss.Far from returning to the playbook of its greatest moment, the ANC has doubled down on the policies that eroded that very victory. While the ANC has perhaps seen fit to bow to the pressure of a public demand for economic growth, it has, rather gallingly, qualified the meaning and substance of such growth well beyond relevance and has paid little more than unconvincing lip service to economic growth.The policies the ANC has championed since May 2024 are not policies designed to attract investment or rebuild confidence. They are policies designed to signal that the party will never abandon its Afro-Leninist revolution, even if the cost is first stagnation and then oblivion.Instead of creating conditions for businesses to hire, it prefers to tighten labour controls. Instead of making South Africa an attractive destination for capital, it flirts with a blanket undermining of property rights, the unaffordable and catastrophic National Health Insurance, and latterly, once again, prescribed assets – schemes that would drain private savings into the coffers of already failing SOEs.This is not a course correction; it is a doubling down on the very strategies that dragged the country into decline.The ANC is writing its own political obituary in front of our eyes. While the DA might have simply outlasted it to take over the position of South Africa’s largest party, while MK and Jacob Zuma might have plunged an assegai into the heart of its national majority, and while the voters will use the ballot papers of coming election cycles to cross out the ANC as a party of consequence, the cause of death will be suicide.Alternative existed all alongThe tragedy for those who have loved and cherished the ANC is that an alternative existed all along. South Africans have not been hostile to the ANC. When it delivered growth and jobs in the early 2000s, they rewarded it lavishly. Had the party’s post-2024 analysis centred on a rediscovery of its own stupendously successful playbook of 2004 – fiscal prudence, economic pragmatism, open markets, and service delivery over total state capture – it could have stabilised or even reversed its fortunes.But the reform that could have saved the ANC will now never reach beyond the hidden corners of analytical might-have-been, in a country where the daily experience of what is shapes the political landscape.The lessons from history are unforgiving. When dominant parties lose their grip and refuse to adapt, they do not fade gracefully. They collapse. The ANC, having squandered the goodwill that once brought it 70% of the vote, now insists on the policies that guaranteed its fall to 30%. Instead of renewal, it has chosen entrenchment. Instead of pragmatism, dogma. Instead of growth, redistribution without production. Instead of survival, an overdose of toxic ideology.The ANC is now on death watch..*Hermann Pretorius studied law and opera before entering politics and, latterly, joining the IRR as an analyst. He is presently the IRR’s Head of Strategic Communications. He describes himself as a Protestant, landless, Anglophilic, Afrikaans classical liberal..*This article was first published on Daily Friend and was republished with permission

ANC’s death spiral: Suicide by ideology, not voter betrayal - Hermann Pretorius

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