ANTHONY BUTLER: Second term for presidents is best and worst of times

While finally in command, second-term leaders also know their time is running out

First published in Business Day

18 October 2024

President Cyril Ramaphosa. File photo: GCIS

For a president the start of a second term is the best of times. But it is also the worst of times.

The first termer is on a learning curve. Lacking experience, they are surrounded by the appointees of their predecessor, hemmed in by policy and budget frameworks set by others, and obliged to campaign in a series of elections in which they are a public punchbag.

It is only after re-election by the party, and then 18 months later by the National Assembly, that a president becomes more or less invulnerable to removal. The second-termer is more experienced, surrounded by a chosen team, confident in cabinet and media manipulation, and adroit in deployment of informal institutions.

However, while finally in command at the apex of national power, second-term leaders also know their time is running out. Factions start to consolidate around potential successors. Initially fluid groupings organise around proxy issues and disrupt the government machine.

Media attention is attracted not by the president’s words but by those of the contenders for their office. Newspapers run extended pieces about ANC succession politics, and soon a political journalist declares the president a “lame duck”.

This cycle leads most presidents to become obsessed with their “legacy”. First, they yearn for a “concrete legacy” of tangible accomplishments. In some political systems this is a moment of real danger. Ageing “strongman” leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Xi Jinping conceive invasion or the expansion of empire as their legacy to their countries.

In more democratic societies presidents leave concrete legislative or governance legacies by signing all kinds of well-meaning policy changes. They are always aware though, that a successor can equally easily erase these accomplishments.

A second legacy ambition concerns the control of presidential succession, which offers a chimera of enduring direct power. Authoritarian-minded presidents often decide they should succeed themselves. Even in SA’s constitutional democracy, with its parliamentary system and two-term limit for presidents, Thabo Mbeki and his retinue fantasised in 2007 that they could retain the ANC presidency, install a puppet state president, and continue to run the country from Luthuli House.

An embarrassing — perhaps even pitiful — variant of this legacy ambition arises when the president discovers that their favourite child turns out to be the best person to run the country after they are gone. 

A third presidential ambition — we might say the desire for a soft legacy — concerns an intangible and persistent influence that continues to shape politics after the leader has gone. 

In SA we tend to think in terms of the “foundations” beloved of our retired political leaders. These purport to pursue particular political philosophies, but in reality serve primarily as tax avoidance vehicles for party veterans. 

The less tangible sources of influence that endure even after the leader retires are harder to create but more enduring, because they are based on memories enshrined in the minds of public officials and wider populations. 

To take one famous example, US president Franklin Roosevelt introduced programmes in the New Deal that continue to shape debate about entitlement programmes in his country.

Nelson Mandela was an ineffectual president in most respects, but he left behind a set of values and perspectives about the creation of a nation around which contemporary political argument in SA still turns. 

The enduring legacy of a political leader resides not in the laws they fashion or in the successors they try to impose. Rather it turns on whether they express more fundamental ideas and arguments that are revisited and reworked by those engaged in politics in future.

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