Mr. Ramaphosa, who lost support partly because he was seen as indecisive, has never faced a more important choice. In making it, he needs to remember that much more is at stake than another presidential term for himself. South Africans were clearly fed up with the ANC’s record of widespread corruption, incompetent delivery of basic public services such as water and electricity, rampant unemployment among the country’s Black majority, and worsening inequality. The country’s future, and that of the entire continent, depends on stabilizing South African democracy and restoring it as a strong engine of economic growth.
Given the voters’ angry mood and the strength of the ANC’s own left-wing traditions, Mr. Ramaphosa will no doubt be tempted to ally with one of two ANC splinter parties. The Economic Freedom Fighters, or EFF, a quasi-Socialist party, got roughly a tenth of the vote. Led by a red beret-wearing firebrand named Julius Malema, whom the ANC expelled for insubordination more than a decade ago, the EFF advocates a sweeping confiscation of White-owned farmland potentially similar to the one that ended ruinously in Zimbabwe under the socialist President Robert Mugabe. Mr. Malema has been twice convicted of hate speech, including a call to “shoot the Boer” (a reference to Afrikaans-speaking White South Africans). Many political analysts in South Africa refer to a potential ANC-EFF coalition, correctly, as “the doomsday scenario.”
Equally troubling, albeit for different reasons, would be an ANC coalition with uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, which is on track to get around 14 percent of the vote, drawn disproportionately from its base in KwaZulu-Natal province. It’s a left-wing Zulu ethno-nationalist party formed by the 82-year-old former ANC President Jacob Zuma, whose terrible tenure, from 2009 to 2018, precipitated the county’s economic slide. He resigned facing corruption charges and was briefly jailed, prompting deadly riots by his supporters that left 300 people dead. Mr. Zuma courted controversy earlier in his career when he was tried and eventually acquitted for rape, after blaming his accuser for wearing a knee-length skirt and claiming he took a shower after sex to reduce his chances of catching H.I.V.
The most logical move for the ANC would be to join forces with the second-place vote-getter, the Democratic Alliance, which is headed for a vote share of around 21 percent. To be sure, this would require the ruling party to pivot to the ideological middle. The DA, as it is known, is a pro-free market party of the center-right, ideologically closest to Britain’s Conservative Party, according to DA leader John Steenhuisen. The party is more pro-Western than the ANC; for example, the DA more firmly and vocally opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This could bring much-needed new balance to the country’s foreign policy generally and its relationship with the United States in particular.
As a potential partner for the ANC, the DA suffers from being seen as the party of South Africa’s privileged White minority (about 8 percent of the population), a category which includes Mr. Steenhuisen, and many of its parliamentary representatives. Still, the DA’s roots lie partly in the liberal White party that opposed apartheid before the transition to democracy. It might also be difficult for the ANC to team up with a party that campaigned against it by publishing a database of ruling party loyalists appointed to key government jobs without qualifications, a corrupt process known as “cadre deployment.”
Yet the ANC has always been a collection of factions rather than a strictly ideological party. Mr. Ramaphosa, who held several top ANC posts under Mr. Mandela, who later became a millionaire in the private sector, hails from the more moderate wing of the party. He should be able to make room for the DA under the ANC’s big tent. Such a coalition could give South Africa a strong, multiethnic, governing majority, based on three-fifths of the votes, and capable of bringing needed economic reforms. That would be good for South Africa, the continent and the world.
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