2024 South African general election, 29 May:

[Cassius]

I mean it was always a bit unbelievable to begin with that the DA and the ANC would be able to successfully cut a deal. In order to avoid getting wiped out come the next election, the DA would have to be in the driving seat of the government and, more importantly, be seen to be in the driving seat (and even then that might not be enough given SA’s intractable problems and the enormous divergence of interests between core DA supporters and supporters of the ANC), which of course would be diametrically against the interests of the ANC.

[Cassius]

Fair comments, but I think that was the point I was broadly trying to make? In order to survive a coalition government intact, the DA needs to extract heavy concessions from the ANC, concessions that will be unpopular with ANC members and supporters and ones that it won’t want to make as it is still by far the largest party (and the only one that can claim, broadly, to be a truly ‘national party’). If the DA fails to do this and ends up being perceived as having ‘sold out’ the interests of its electorate, the barriers to entry for a new party representing ‘white interests’ (although I imagine it wouldn’t explicitly market itself as such) are very low, given proportional representation and the low threshold required to enter parliament.

After all, the DA owes its current formulation to very similar movements in the 1999 general election, when large numbers of white voters decamped to it from the National Party thanks to the latter’s lack of definition (were they going to be a collaborative coalition partner with the ANC; a representative of white and coloured interests in government; or an opposition party?) versus the then DP’s consistently critical stance of the government. Given the enormous gulf between the electorates of the DA and the ANC (and of course, the ANC will be looking to try and regain voters that it has lost to EFF and MK) and the visceral ill-feeling (to put it mildly) that exists between the two parties, coalition negotiations become a zero-sum game in which one side has to be seen to win at the expense of the other, which isn’t conducive to government formation.