Will South Africa’s foreign policy survive under a DA-ANC coalition government
The impossible compromise
Will South Africa’s foreign policy survive under a DA-ANC coalition government?
With the ANC losing its majority in the national election and South Africa heading towards a coalition government, the policy of aligning with the interests of the Global South and taking a strong stance against Israel, as well as maintaining neutrality on Russia-Ukraine is coming into question. Not finding a middle ground will likely create conflict among the potential coalition partners.
South Africa is a post colonial society marked with hybrid identities and a plurality of perspectives among its ethnic groups. The 2024 general election results showed this clearly, because the outcomes read as if it was a racial and ethnic census. The minorities pooled their votes together and voted mostly for the Democratic Alliance, and additionally the largest black ethnic group, the Zulus, decided to break away from the ANC and vote for the disgruntled former President Jacob Zuma. In percentage points the results reflected the same outcome as when Nelson Mandela was elected in 1994 - almost as if the Rainbow Nation’s last 30 years did not mend a new national identity. Nethertheless, the various ethnicities do not only disagree on the future leadership and economic direction of South Africa, but they also hold strong views about the histories of countries that are far away.
The two probable coalition partners, the African National Congress and the Democratic Alliance, will face challenges in maintaining unity due to the deep disagreements between, and within their electorates, regarding South Africa’s foreign policy. For instance, while the DA has traditionally advocated for “a two-state solution", it in practice took the USA’s position of a de facto “one state reality” by never actively criticizing the extremist Israeli settlers. Notably the leader of the opposition, John Steenhuisen, in 2023 fired a member of his shadow cabinet for expressing support for Palestine. The reason for the DA’s support of Israel is that many of its former leaders such as Helen Zille and Tony Leon have strong historical ties to South Africa’s Jewish Minority and South Africa’s Israeli Lobby in particular. But it gets complicated, because the DA’s electorate is actually divided on the issue. South Africa’s small Muslim Minority for example have been in the forefront of criticizing Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, and they reside in the Western Cape - the only province that the DA governs.
Furthermore, Emma Louise Powell, the DA’s Shadow Minister for International Relations and Cooperation, boasts the titles of Mandela Washington Fellow 2023 and Munich Young Leader 2024. Both these affiliations have historically been linked with initiatives employed by the United States to foster stronger political ties with Africa. Powell even previously attended the Munich Security council. The DA's politics indicates a preference for South Africa to be tethered to the Western block. They will be reluctant to confront the US directly and to break from it by aligning with China or India on other major international issues. The DA even swallowed the entire western narrative on Russia-Ukraine when John Steenhuisen visited Ukraine as the invasion started. The sentiment is shared by many party officials, because for example the DA’s mayor in Cape Town, Alan Winde, sought to arrest Vladimir Putin during the Johannesburg BRICS summit - in disregard for SAs foreign policy of maintaining a neutral stance.
The ANC in contrast had the opposite position. The Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Naledi Pandor, for example openly confronted Benjamin Netanyahu by taking his government to the International Court of Justice, alledging genocide for the response to the October 7th attacks. She furthermore refused to condemn Russia at the United Nations, while deviating from the western perspective by openly acknowledging the obvious contributing role of NATO expansion to the conflict. She managed to not buckle under international pressure when South Africa voted at the UN to stay neutral in the Russian-Ukrainian War. It was also under Pandor’s advice that Ramaphosa led the African Peace initiative that insisted that Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin find a way to maintain dialogue during the war. Additionally she also kept good relations with India and China, the two rising economic powers, and furthermore she strengthened links with the Global South by expanding the membership of the BRICS trading block.
Pandor also attempted non alignment when she insisted, on more than one occasion, that South Africa values and does not seek to antagonize our good relationship with the United States of America - despite the disagreements over notably Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. In fact, despite being called hypocritical, she even explicitly defended Israel’s right to exist, but under the conditions of international law that also recognises a Palestinian State. South Africa’s official position on Israel-Palestine was in fact no different than the majority of the countries at the United Nations.
Where she broke from non alignment was the initiative to confront Netanyahu at the International Court of Justice and the willingness to not back down in the face of an American and Israeli political response. The move predictably antagonized South Africa’s local Jewish community whose Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, accused the ANC of acting as “the diplomatic proxy of Iran”. Her conversion to Islam, and the influence of her husband who she met while studying in Botswana, undoubtedly played a role in her decision to stick to her conviction, but the real pressure actually came from the ANC’s electorate who pressured Ramaphosa to act on the matter. Black South Africans in particular have a strong empathy for the Palestinians, given the ANC’s historical links to the PLO that go back all the way to Nelson Mandela. My initial impression was that Ramaphosa was reluctant to act, because It’s worth remembering that when he came to power, Ramaphosa was endorsed by SAs Jewish community to the extent that he was accused by many opponents of being “in the pocket of the Jews”.
Where Pandor’s policy stretched from a respectable non-alignment to slightly naivety was her misperception that South Africa, with an economy the size of Maryland, could, like India, punch above its weight in international affairs and remain truly non aligned. The ANC would rather take the view that the Western World is no longer in a position to lecture the rest of the world - a perception commonly held among leadership in the Global South and in the former colonial empires in particular.
They would like to flex their geopolitical muscle, while simultaneously being ignorant of their geopolitical insignificance. By basic economic metrics, South Africa is still dependent on the West, for example although China is South Africa's largest trading partner, its trade volume does not surpass the combined contributions of the USA and the EU.
In contrast our trade with Russia is less than our annual trade with Angola, South Africa’s 25th largest trading partner. The favorable conditions of the generous AGOA trade agreement actually costs American Taxpayers money, and the USA can easily exert pressure on South Africa if it truly wanted to topple its regime. In fact this was almost the case in 2023 when the Republican staffed USA foreign affairs committee debated the topic. South Africa’s position that shows a wish for a multipolar world stands in contrast with the DA’s who can be perceived by the to act in the opposite extreme, as if South Africa is still the last outpost of the British Empire. This position is also unrealistic and it will be increasingly impossible to uphold, in particular as America’s influence and GDP continues to wane relative to the rest of the world.
If the DA-ANC coalition is going to work, then a balance on foreign policy is going to be required. The DA should recognise that the ANC faces significant pressure from various sectors, including unions and internal party dynamics, making it impossible for any South African president to not to act in favour of the Palestinians - in particular when Israel has now dropped more bombs on them than the allies did on Dresden, and killed more innocent civilians than Slobodan Milošević did during the Srebrenica massacre.
But the opposite also applies if the coalition is to work. By pressuring the DA voters to take a side, the coalition risks collapsing and the ANC will be forced to join the MK Party and Economic Freedom Fighters - who hold even more extreme positions on Israel, that include wanting to send more weapons to arm Hamas.
South Africa is situated in the South Atlantic, it serves as the gateway to Africa and a midway between Europe, North America and Asia. Ideally, our foreign policy should reflect our geopolitical reality. A failure to commit to non-alignment and to recognise that the ANC support base is unlikely to agree on the same foreign policy as the DA, in particular as it relates to Israel, will require a political compromise.
The majority ANC voters simply will not support a coalition partner that is seen as upholding a pro-western foreign policy that is derived from its colonial legacies, and simultaneously the DA’s core constituency will not accept one that aims to alienate the USA and Europe - and actively works against Israel. The Palestinians who have depended on South Africa’s support at the International Court of Justice shouldn't take it for granted that a future coalition government will sustain Pandor’s level of commitment on the matter, and neither should the Israeli government, nor the USA nor Russia expect full diplomatic support.
Geopolitics is ultimately about self interest and as Nelson Mandela once remarked, “One of the mistakes which some political analysts make is to think their enemies should be our enemies”.