ANC’s fatal reflex: How its coalition grip is speeding up oblivion - Hermann Pretorius
Key topics
ANC treats coalitions as extensions of its dominance
Public blames ANC alone for GNU failures
DA gains credit while ANC sinks in polls
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From as early as the 1980s, the ANC has exhibited a reflex of treating any broad coalition or unity front as an extension of itself, rather than as a genuine power-sharing arrangement.
This habit was shaped by two formative experiences: its relationship with the United Democratic Front (UDF) in the 1980s and its control of the first constitutionally mandated Government of National Unity (GNU) after 1994.
The result is a party culture and set of intrinsic, unshakeable assumptions in which coalition is not understood as a compact between equals, but as an organisational and policy extension of the ANC itself.
To a significant extent, this mindset now defines its conduct in the present GNU, and has clear consequences for how the public perceives both the ANC and its partners – and how future electoral judgements are likely to be hostile to the ANC, even if the concept of collaborative politics and the GNU as manifestation of this remain broadly popular.
The UDF, founded in 1983, was formally a diverse coalition of anti-apartheid organisations. Tom Lodge described it as “a federation linking a large and heterodox collection of organisations” but noted that its strongest footholds were in areas with established ANC traditions and that many local leaders were linked to the ANC.
Raymond Suttner, reflecting on its legacy, described the UDF as operating both as an agent of the ANC and as an autonomous actor. Whatever its internal diversity, the UDF served the ANC’s strategic purposes during its years in exile, allowing it to project influence inside the country while maintaining a plausible organisational distance.
Yet Rushil Ranchod finds that this closeness between the UDF and the ANC “curtailed [the UDF’s] legitimacy as a neutral and non-partisan opposition movement”. In her seminal work on the late-apartheid fragmentation of anti-apartheid South African liberalism, The Liberal Slideaway, Institute of Race Relations (IRR) veteran and founder member of the Black Sash, Jill Wentzel, identifies the latter organisation’s co-operation with the UDF as effectively a breaking-point of principle.
The appeal for liberals, Wentzel writes, of the UDF was in its nominal unaffiliated status as a viable mass movement against apartheid, yet the radicalism permeating from the ANC/South African Communist Party alliance and the proxy status of the UDF for the ANC were ignored even by anti-ANC, anti-apartheid liberals. Mercifully, the leadership of John Kane-Berman and the IRR’s historic commitment to seeing things for what they truly are saved the organisation from the capture and slideaway too many of its ideological peers fell victim to.
Folded into the party
When the ban on the ANC was lifted, much of the UDF’s leadership and organisational infrastructure was folded into the party. The 1991 disbanding occurred as preparations for South Africa’s first democratic election got under way. That the ANC would participate as the de facto political representative of the entire UDF reinforces the fact that the ANC came to see the UDF as little more than an extension of itself. Throughout the UDF’s eight years of activities as an ANC proxy, the lesson for the party was that a broad, multi-member front could deliver legitimacy, resources, and mass reach without requiring the party to relinquish primacy.
The first GNU after the 1994 elections confirmed this lesson. The interim constitution required that any party with more than 5% of the vote should be offered a place in the Cabinet. The National Party (NP) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) entered government alongside the ANC. In practice, the ANC’s commanding majority meant that the party’s Reconstruction and Development Programme became the government’s policy framework. ANC ministers held the key portfolios, and policy direction followed the ANC’s priorities.
The NP’s frustrated and ill-fated departure from the GNU in 1996 rested on the reality that as with the UDF, the GNU was an ANC-driven vehicle, intolerant of substantive influence from junior partners. The arrangement had been inclusionary in form but not in substance. The experience entrenched in the collective psyche of the ANC was that it could run a unity government without surrendering its core agenda: the National Democratic Revolution (NDR).
These two experiences trained a political reflex that is on full display in 2025, a year after the founding of South Africa’s second GNU. However, this time it was necessitated by political factors rather than constitutional obligation. After falling to reach 40% at the ballot box, the ANC negotiated a new GNU with the DA. Whilst both these parties approved of the inclusion of the IFP in this coalition, the ANC acted unilaterally by expanding the GNU to ten parties. This was an obvious and blatant violation of the GNU’s founding Statement of Intent (SOI). It was also the first sign that the ANC would treat this GNU much as it had treated the first and the UDF: as a convenient extension of the ANC’s power and position.
“Core pillar”
Perhaps the most brazen affirmation of the ANC’s understanding of the GNU, within the context of this reflex to treat broad-based alliances this way, came in August 2025, when following a meeting of the party’s NEC, President Ramaphosa proclaimed that “despite all the noise, through the GNU we have been able to safeguard the core progressive policy agenda of the National Democratic Revolution which is the core pillar of ANC policies”.
In this arrogant assumption of the nature of the GNU’s ordained subservience to the ANC’s will, the party and its top cadres may have thus far enjoyed the thrills and trappings of ANC dominance in an ANC-led GNU, yet perhaps unbeknownst and unanticipated, it has led to a perceived electoral trap from which the party may never escape. By treating the GNU brazenly as an extension of the ANC’s mandate, the party has established its ownership of the government.
As long as the ANC dominates the GNU, South Africans see the GNU as a modified ANC government – one that defensively keeps out the radical insanity of MK and the EFF, and one that allows some measure of taming of the ANC’s worst impulses, yet essentially, it’s an ANC government. This means that when the government fails, the electorate’s reflex has become to blame the ANC, not the coalition as a whole.
This is likely exacerbated by the public distrust of the ANC. November 2022 polling by the Social Research Foundation (SRF) found that a whopping 74% of registered voters associated the ANC with broken promises. For context, the DA ranked second on this associative ranking, with 8%.
The promise of the GNU, evidenced by optimism found in SRF and IRR polling in the latter half of 2024, was that South Africa’s socio-economic situation would improve. A year later, with unemployment remaining disastrously high and notable economic growth still illusory, the likelihood is that the blame for the GNU’s broken promise has come to lie, and will lie for the foreseeable future, with the party strongly associated with broken promises: the ANC.
Credit and condemnation
Polling since May 2024 shows how this plays out. The GNU is seen to be going against the expected trend of coalitions, i.e. shared public credit and condemnation. Polling by the Brenthurst Foundation and Sabi Strategy Group found in April 2025 that, despite both parties being yoked to the GNU, most respondents judged the DA to be more effective at governing than the ANC. The IRR’s March/April 2025 polling was even more striking, putting the DA ahead of the ANC for the first time – the DA just above 30%, the ANC just below.
As these parties are the most visible members of the same government and might have been expected to share in its perceived successes and failures, these diverging numbers are notable. The fact that the DA has gained ground while the ANC has at best held steady and at worst slipped into the lower-to-mid 30s is explained by the public perception that the ANC is leading a government that fails to deliver on its core promises.
From the data, it is reasonable to deduce that the South African public sees the DA as a prominent partner in the GNU, able to bring to bear some of its strengths like better service delivery, clean governance, and accountability, but that the ANC remains the GNU’s decision-maker.
Ironically, therefore, the ANC forthright dominance of the GNU at the DA’s expense in the power games of politics allows the DA to position itself as having limited responsibility for failure to deliver on the GNU promise, while still sharing in the visibility of governance – and doing so, according to the April 2025 polling by the Brenthurst Foundation and Sabi Strategy Group, with greater public approval. The GNU ministries with high public approval are all under non-ANC ministers, with four of them being DA-led ministries.
To the extent that public approval for the GNU is still notable, but seemingly waning owing to the lack of substantive and tangible delivery on its founding socio-economic promise, the ANC seems incapable of escaping the downward drag of public blame. Why? Because it has made no effort to dilute the self-constructed public perception of its control of the GNU, nor does its internal political logic and approach to any broad coalition or unity front allow it to do so. Its well-established reflex is to treat coalitions as ANC projections. It cannot truly see a unity movement or government as anything other than an extension of itself.
Likely fatal weakness
The consequence is that the ANC’s dominance, which it sees as necessary to protect its political standing, patronage, and power, has changed from being a significant strength to being its likely fatal weakness. In the pre-2024 political reality, the ANC’s dominance was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. The perception of unassailable ANC dominance allowed it to dominate.
Yet, the post-2024 reality is significantly more ominous for South Arica’s oldest political party: its intransigent and incurable idolisation of its dominance now comes at the cost of public support.
This is unlikely to be a temporary situation. The ANC’s ‘political dominance’ reflex, shaped by the UDF and the first GNU, is entrenched. Its political partners may chafe at this, but the party’s institutional memory and strategic instincts are too deeply ingrained for it to share power in any meaningful sense.
The political outcome of this is fatal. In the ANC’s view, to loosen its grip would be to invite erosion of its authority and to lose control of the national agenda. Yet by maintaining that grip, it becomes the sole owner of failure in the public mind. In this way the ANC’s own history has created a trap from which it shows no ability or inclination to escape: one in which its instinct to dominate condemns it to bear the political costs of government while its principal rival and governing partner grows stronger.
Perhaps the sting in the tail of this deadly scorpion is that the ANC’s own logic is what is hurtling it towards oblivion – not any coalition it might be part of.
With the current GNU, especially with the perceived positive attributes of the DA’s skill and the IFP’s calming influence securing at least some measure of stability and credibility from markets, investors, and foreign governments, the final demise of the ANC might be delayed. This delay might even offer the party a last shot at rehabilitation, if it eschews its dominance obsession.
Were the ANC not to go this route; were it to partner with the more radical parties of MK and the EFF, the escalation of failure and the flight of any remaining positive sentiment towards South Africa would unleash even greater floods of blame compared with the current trickle of unmet expectations. As with the current GNU, the ANC would be the object of such erosive blame.
The ANC’s unmitigated and historically entrenched desire for dominance in a time of coalition politics has placed the party on a fatal trajectory. Destination: oblivion.
*This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission