ANTHONY BUTLER: GNU parties should beware myopic short-term pact

As post-election euphoria subsides, the underlying character and longer-term prospects of the GNU are attracting interest. Is the current coalition government here to stay?

The answer may simply be that this is up to the bigger parties involved. At the core of GNU it remains a coalition between the ANC and DA, with the IFP — and other small party participants — that make the whole enterprise regionally and racially credible.

The bigger parties may decide to treat the coalition instrumentally, as a mechanism to protect their vote shares, enhance their public profiles and secure public office for their leaders in the short term.

As the 2026 local government elections approach, party leaders may choose to minimise the immediate electoral costs of the elite pact they have struck, deploy divisive public relations strategies that belittle coalition partners, and focus on boosting their individual vote shares.

After all, the default position of political parties, especially larger ones, is to stay the same. Large organisations find change painful because foundational values infuse everything they do, party elites are tied into intricate regional and ideological power balances, and links to key constituencies and donors have made the party what it is.

Party success and endurance has often relied on an ability to channel resources such as jobs and public services to particular constituencies, or on a dogmatic assertion of anachronistic ideological nostrums.

Political parties sadly resemble football clubs — with managers, players, funders and fans symbolically fused into a happy mob — rather more closely than they resemble repositories of wisdom and the rational calculation of interests.

While a short-term pact between football teams is the easiest way forward for the GNU parties, such an approach would be shortsighted. The idea of sufficient consensus between the ANC and the DA that underpins the current coalition will not survive very long. By providing an effective veto to the DA, it will antagonise smaller parties as conflicts over policy choices escalate.

The major opposition parties that remain outside the charmed circle, notably the MK party and the EFF, already account for a quarter of seats in the National Assembly. Once they learn how to work together and fuse their electoral offerings they will pose a growing challenge.

To fight off this anti-constitutionalist menace, parties in the GNU should stick together — but also to change. With all due deference to party leaders’ sensitive feelings, this process must start with a recognition of failure. Fewer than one in three of the eligible voting age population actually turned out for the two parties — ANC and DA together — at end-May.

The ANC has become addicted to patronage as a tool of political management, even as the power brokers it creates have generated insurgent factions that now threaten to destroy it.

The DA remains in deep denial about its image as a white-centred party, attributing this representation to an antagonistic media, confused citizens and the alleged bitterness of former black party leaders who have left.

Coalition government institutions, properly designed, can help struggling leaders face up to their deficiencies and begin to overcome them. As long-term partners the ANC and IFP can help the DA reconsider how it looks to those who do not trust it. The DA and the IFP can meanwhile assist the ANC to overcome its enduring legacy of struggle accounting.

It would be sad if the GNU was just a short-term stopgap. If it is to be more than that, the parties involved need to adopt attitudes — and create institutional mechanisms — that allow them to learn from, as well as advise, one another.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.