DAVID LEWIS: More effective ways needed to manage deep GNU differences

Amid the predictable melodrama generated by this year of multiple elections have been some convention-shattering outcomes.

In the UK, the Labour Party has recorded a resounding victory; SA has a coalition government; France is heading in the same direction, though with some disturbing gains for the ultra-right, which registered similar gains in the EU elections; in India Narendra Modi’s seemingly inexorable rise has been countered; the claimed outcome of Venezuela’s election has been rejected by most credible observers and large swathes of the citizenry; and the less said about Russia’s election the better.   

Let’s look at two of these dramatic events. In SA, though it’s still early days, the new coalition government — dubbed a government of national unity (GNU) — seems to be holding together, accounting for a palpable sense of optimism in our public and private spaces.

Within the executive of government precisely that which I hoped for appears to be happening, namely constructive competition between the parties and their respective ministers inside the governing coalition over who can outdo their partners in meeting their briefs. Predictably, it’s the new brooms that are making all of the running, but there is evidence that the ANC is shaking off its cobwebs in response to the energy and enthusiasm demonstrated by its governing partners.   

However, we have to find more effective mechanisms for managing some of the deepest differences between the GNU partners, at least in the early years of coalition government. Collective cabinet responsibility is too uncompromising a requirement.

Notwithstanding our persistent belief in SA exceptionalism, we didn’t invent coalition government. Italy has been governed by a multiparty government since the early 1940s and Germany since 1961. The last single-party government in the Netherlands was in 1879. So there’s plenty of experience to draw on.

We should seek to learn from the experiences of others. For example, New Zealand’s government has an “agree to disagree” mechanism built into its coalition arrangement. This provides that while collective responsibility for cabinet decisions is the default, where a coalition member has committed itself to a particular policy position before the formation of the coalition but is confronted by a majority cabinet agreement deeply at odds with its stated policy, it should be entitled to invoke the “agree to disagree” mechanism, which allows the dissenting party to remain a member of the coalition while opposing, in public and in parliament, the majority coalition policy. 

Rules would have to be built into the coalition arrangement that would ensure the “agree to disagree” mechanism would only be invoked after all other deadlock-breaking mechanisms were exhausted, but in the case of irresoluble disagreement the New Zealand arrangement would prevent a collapse of the coalition agreement despite a failure to achieve consensus over a single issue. 

Gauteng corruption

While the GNU is opposed from the right by the EFF and Jacob Zuma’s MK party, and there is some trivial opposition from the left in the shape of the SACP, the most potentially destructive opposition comes from within the ANC itself. Clearly the leadership of that opposition comes from the Gauteng ANC. Its opposition to the national leadership of the ANC, expressed in its resistance to a provincial representation of the national coalition government, is chutzpah of the highest order. After all, this is the province in which the ANC suffered its greatest electoral reverse and that cannot claim the extraordinary circumstances to which its KwaZulu-Natal counterparts were subject. 

It is also the province in which the ANC leadership has been stable for the longest time. I would have imagined that they would want to keep their heads firmly down and toe the dominant line lest the finger of blame for the party’s electoral setback point squarely at the uncaring, arrogant quality of their long-standing leadership and the appalling record of service delivery and rampant corruption in the province. We may have to wait for the next local government elections, in which the ANC will surely decline further, before we see their backs, but see their backs we certainly will. Next time around they may not be offered the opportunity to serve in a provincial governing coalition. 

Moving further afield, there are few political events that match the melodrama of a US presidential election. What with the attempted assassination of one candidate, the belated withdrawal of a second, replaced by the entry of a third who is turning every expectation on its head, and a vice-presidential candidate who admits to having had sex with a couch, this is no ordinary year. What a choice confronts the US electorate, between an aged racist and misogynist, and an energetic, black woman.

There’s a tendency on the left to imagine that there is no difference between a Republican and a Democratic administration in the US. While I concede that the deep differences in their respective approaches to domestic policy issues are often elided in their conduct of foreign policy, this is slowly but surely changing, partly in response to the widespread public opposition in the US to its government’s complicity in Israel’s appalling conduct in Gaza.

Kamala Harris has a real prospect of winning this election. But the darkest spot on the near horizon is the prospect of a full-scale regional war in the Middle East. The Democratic administration in the US will be damned if it enters a war and damned if it doesn’t. Either way, the Democrats will lose the election. The Israeli government is the fly in the electoral ointment. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (focused, as always, on saving his own skin) and the rest of the apocalyptic zealots in his governing coalition want to end this war by eliminating the Iranian theocracy. Israel is not capable of achieving this on its own, so it is provoking Iran into a direct military intervention that will enable Israel to up the ante, followed by further action by Iran, ultimately drawing the US into a war it, and probably Iran, doesn’t want.

Meanwhile, there are other self-interested cynics who would also like to see the US engaged in full-scale combat in the Middle East. Russian security council deputy chair Dmitry Medvedev, who is usually called upon to give expression to Vladimir Putin’s most belligerent instincts, is on record saying that “it’s clear to everyone that a full-scale war is the only way to a shaky peace in the [Middle East] region”. 

How else, other than as a conscious provocation, does one interpret the otherwise insane assassination, in Tehran of all places, of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, widely acknowledged to be the pragmatic face of Hamas, who had been representing his organisation in the negotiations that have sought an end to the slaughter in Gaza? Even US President Joe Biden, a long-standing and unconditional supporter of Israel, has described Haniyeh’s assassination as “not very helpful”.

Say it louder and clearer, Joe! Because if you don’t, come November who knows what Donald Trump will do in the Middle East, and everywhere else in the world for that matter. 

• Lewis, a former trade unionist, academic, policymaker, regulator and company board member, was a co-founder and director of Corruption Watch.