Editorial | Elections: Tensions as parties talk about talks

The outcome of South Africa’s elections last week — which saw the ANC’s vote share dip well below 50% — has opened the door to coalition talks.

Parties have begun talks about talks, with the first exploratory discussions between the ANC and its competitors taking place earlier this week. 

The party has hard decisions to make in choosing which of its former opponents it will work with (and how) and has an equally difficult task in selling whichever option it takes to its members, voters and allies.

The ANC’s national executive committee met on Thursday to consider who it wants to partner with for the next five years and what form that relationship will take, with competing groupings inside the party attempting to sway the decision.

Attempts are also being made to influence the party’s decision — and to shift public opinion — on editorial pages, social media and in the streets.

The rest of the parties — and South Africa — await the ANC’s decision anxiously, knowing that the longer the party takes to resolve its internal differences and to commit to a plan for governance, the greater the danger to us all. They will all have to make some form of concession in the coming days — the parties have little more than a week left to come to a working agreement to govern and to constitute parliament before the deadline to do so expires.

While the negotiations take place, the risk to the economy increases. The rand’s performance has been volatile in the days after the elections and weakened to R18.93 to the dollar on Wednesday. Two days after the vote, South Africa’s 10-year government bond yield was slightly below 10.9%, down from one-month lows of 10.96%.

There are more than financial reasons for the parties to conclude their horse trading as swiftly — and with as little rancour — as possible.

South Africans exercised their democratic right to vote and gave no single party the right to govern the country. The mandate to all across the spectrum is clear: play your part in South Africa’s transition from 30 years of dominance by a single party and in finding a new way forward for the country.

Dragging out the process while tensions remain high in KwaZulu-Natal, a province perpetually on edge and where the potential for political violence is real, adds danger on another level. 

The province has a legacy of violence and is still recovering from the 2021 riots which claimed more than 300 lives.

The overnight ascendance of the uMkhonto weSizwe party, its challenge to the electoral outcome and the potential of it boycotting the first sittings of parliament have increased the political temperature.

In the light of all this, the responsibility is on party leaders to move beyond their ideological positions and find each other — swiftly — and deliver on the mandate they received from their voters.