ANTHONY BUTLER | Why it is so difficult to predict who will follow Ramaphosa

Lessons from Japan and India point to the once-dominant party’s possible future

March 20, 2026 at 05:00 am

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

The breezy confidence many political analysts display about the identity of SA’s next president is rather surprising. Predicting who will take over from Cyril Ramaphosa is in fact becoming increasingly difficult.

It has never been all that easy, of course. We have still not heard the full story of how Thabo Mbeki came to succeed Nelson Mandela. Jacob Zuma’s 2007 landslide victory in Polokwane, which guaranteed his ascension to the Union Buildings, shocked many observers, and we seem to have forgotten that Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, not Ramaphosa, could easily be state president now.

But the challenges of prediction have dramatically deepened. One feature of a “dominant party” such as the post-1994 ANC is that it held a majority of seats in the National Assembly. It could elect its chosen president immediately after national elections.

That explains why diligent scholars and journalists have become addicted to studying ANC factionalism, the mechanics of list processes, turmoil at provincial conferences and the machinations of regional power brokers.

The trouble is that the ANC is no longer a dominant party, having secured only 40% of votes in the 2024 national and provincial elections. What happens when a dominant party weakens but does not disappear?

Lessons from abroad

Consider what happened to the national leadership under other formerly dominant parties, such as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that governed Japan unchallenged in 1955-93, and the Indian National Congress (INC) that controlled India in 1947-89.

In 1993 the LDP briefly lost power when a coalition of opposition parties formed a government under Morihiro Hosokawa. When the LDP returned to power, party factions began viewing prime ministers as temporary coalition managers, and leadership turnover dramatically accelerated.

Tenure was tied to election results, coalition management and factional bargaining. Shinzo Abe’s first premiership lasted just one year, and Yasuo Fukuda and Taro Aso survived little longer. The result was at most single-term leadership, though stability was later restored to a degree after 2012 under Abe.

When the INC was dominant, leadership authority was concentrated in national figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. When the INC lost its parliamentary majority in 1989 coalition government became normal and the party’s internal authority fragmented. New party leaders such as PV Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi faced relentless internal competition as they sought to build majority governing coalitions.

Flawed assumptions

Under coalition systems, leaders are vulnerable because electoral setbacks trigger internal leadership challenges, while coalition partners restrict feasible leadership choices. The need for state power is ultimately decisive, so the management of coalitions becomes central. Meanwhile, factions look for opportunities to displace a leader whose autonomy is constrained by the need to maintain a coalition.

That suggests analysts should abandon the lazy assumption that two-term leadership is the norm, that historic pathways from deputy to leader still exist, and that party leader and coalition government head will be the same person.

One useful model was advanced by Mbeki when his second term as ANC and state president was drawing to a close in 2007. He ran for a third term as party leader, and his slate included Dlamini-Zuma as deputy president. The clear intention was that Mbeki and his team would steer the country from Luthuli House, while Dlamini-Zuma was elevated to a state presidency henceforth under strict party direction.

Assumptions about deputy president Paul Mashatile’s supposed “front-runner” status for a two-term leadership of the ANC and the state are therefore triply wrong-headed. He may lose altogether; there is a strong likelihood that no leader will serve longer than a single term in future; and the party may deploy a more junior leader to run a coalition government as state president.

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