In the seven months since it was formed, South Africa’s unlikely unity government has been stretched and cracked but remains intact under the leadership of President Cyril Ramaphosa, who delivers its first state of the nation address Thursday.
Several loud quarrels have erupted over sticking points such as language education in schools and Ramaphosa’s warm words towards Russia but nothing that has made real the threats and fears of collapse.
“They think we are at each other’s throats. We are not. We continue to meet and talk,” Ramaphosa said in the wake of the latest crisis sparked by his signing of a property expropriation bill last month.
The second-largest partner in the 10-party coalition, the Democratic Alliance, was angry that Ramaphosa signed the act without consulting his partners in the government of national unity (GNU).
“This is not how coalitions work,” DA leader John Steenhuisen fumed. “We will not be reduced to being spectators.”
But the party did not object to the need for land reform in the country, where most farmland is owned by whites. It also sided with Ramaphosa when the bill was attacked by US President Donald Trump for allowing the “confiscation” of property, saying this was untrue.
The DA has six ministries in exchange for propping up Ramaphosa’s ANC in government after it failed to win enough votes in the May election to govern alone, a first since the party took power in 1994 and ended decades of white-minority apartheid rule.
It was an unlikely collaboration, with the DA a long and critical rival of the African National Congress (ANC).
But the GNU, which includes eight other smaller parties, has been credited with bringing some stability to the continent’s most industrialized economy as it faces a host of challenges, from an unemployment rate topping 30%, to high rates of crime.
Big business
While it has fumed and flexed, the center-right DA is also aware that, should it quit the unity government, the ANC could find support from the radical-left EFF and the populist MK parties, now in opposition.
It is a scenario it calls a “doomsday coalition”.
“This is something the DA will move Table Mountain to avoid,” Sunday Times editor-in-chief Makhudu Sefara wrote in a weekend column. “And therein lies the extent to which they’re prepared to compromise.”
The DA will not walk out, said political scientist Sandile Swana.
“It is the political party of big business,” he said. “And the GNU was mandated, or demanded or directed, to come into existence by big business in South Africa.”
Despite some cynical maneuvring at local government level — for example, to push out the DA mayor of the city of Tshwane in September — the coalition will even survive bitter local elections due in late 2026, said political scientist Susan Booysen told AFP.
“They could actually go into a poisonous, toxic local government election campaign and continue with the national coalition,” she said. “It’s such a schizophrenic type of coalition.”
Ramaphosa, meanwhile, is walking a fine line within his own party, where a large faction of the ANC wants him to assert that it “is not in the DA’s pocket,” Booysen said.
But even if Ramaphosa does not complete his term as president, with his future as head of the party not guaranteed after ANC leadership elections in 2027, his successor is also unlikely to end the fractious collaboration, Swana said.
“Even if Ramaphosa is removed, I do not think they will kick the DA out of government,” Swana said.
“The GNU, as things stand, will last the five-year period.”
