ANTHONY BUTLER: When politicians have to shackle themselves to a rotting corpse

First published in BDLive

09 FEBRUARY 2024 – 05:00

In this historic year in global politics, 64 countries accounting for almost half of the world’s population are scheduled to hold national elections.

Of course, most of these elections will be rigged. We should not concern ourselves unduly about the swing vote for the Supreme People’s Assembly in the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea or the presidential elections of the Russian Federation.

At the freer and fairer end of the electoral spectrum it is the old colonial power, the UK, that offers many surprising parallels for SA. Electors are fed up with an exhausted Conservative Party government that is beset by scandal and plagued by corruption. Citizens bewail failing public services, a “cost of living” crisis, a sclerotic economy, and sewage that runs into the rivers.

But in this disunited kingdom the official opposition Labour party lacks the leadership and popular support it needs to secure a majority later in the year. All of this means a coalition government is quite likely before the end of 2024. Like South Africans though, Britons don’t really know how to do it.

After the 2010 elections Labour won a minority of seats but the Conservatives were also unable to form a government on their own. The Liberal Democrats or “Lib Dems”, who held the balance of power, were policy soul mates of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s Labour, and most party members and activists were strongly opposed to a coalition deal with the Conservatives. Nevertheless, the party leaders opted for just that.

In the end, the personalities of the party leaders, and the trust between them, were key factors in this decision. The incumbent Labour negotiators, in the words of one prominent Lib Dem fixer, were “arrogant, exhausted, and divided”. He noted that they were simply unwilling to compromise with a smaller party, and governing with them would be like being “shackled to a rotting corpse”.

Earlier this week in SA, social development minister Lindiwe Zulu threw a tentative stone into the political firepool to see if it would make a splash. In Moscow, in the exile days, she had studied journalism and she remains a communications professional. It was therefore of great interest when she appeared on the SABC’s early morning Sunrise programme on Tuesday morning to reflect on coalition politics.

The idea she ran up the flagpole was that the media has been “slanting towards” coalition government. Debate about coalitions is not a logical consequence of the possible decline of ANC to minority status, but rather the malign project of news media determined to “get rid of the ANC”.

Zulu’s tentative thoughts about the intrinsic undesirability of coalition suggest there is a real concern in the ANC that the party’s election prospects are poor. Nonetheless, there is real resistance to formal coalition deals.

This may be because the divergent preferences of different provinces make coalition deals all but impossible. After all, the Gauteng ANC has been making loving eyes at the EFF for years — but other ANC provinces detest it. The IFP might be a convenient partner at national level, but that would surely complicate deals in KwaZulu-Natal.

Moreover, formal coalitions are sure to involve some transparent policy pledges to which the partners would have to commit. Worst of all, coalitions mean politicians who have spent decades ensconced in the comfortable hierarchies of the liberation movement actually have to negotiate with other people and build trust.

As in Britain in 2010, coalition politics isn’t just about arithmetic and policy congruence. It also succeeds as the result of trust between individuals and groups, good or bad fortune and the personalities of senior leaders. Who will be willing to shackle themselves to our own rotting corpse later in the year?

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