Following the steep decline of the African National Congress, or ANC, in South Africa’s national elections in May and the formation of a coalition government of national unity in its aftermath, all policy areas have now become contested terrain in Pretoria, at least in theory. In dominating the party system that prevailed from 1994 to 2024, the ANC did not attach much weight to the views of opposition parties. Debates over policy were conducted exclusively within the broad coalition that was the ANC. That era ended in May when the ANC’s vote share fell to the historic low of 40 percent, ushering in a new age of coalition politics for South Africa.
How the struggle to determine policy within the current government unfolds will turn on the relationship between the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, DA, the country’s long-standing center-right opposition party that finished in second place in May with 22 percent of the vote. With their combined share of the vote, the erstwhile bitter enemies now dominate the new power-sharing government. So far, their policy differences have largely focused on domestic issues such as education and health policy, but the fault lines between the ANC and DA on foreign policy are becoming more visible.
The ANC’s foreign policy trajectory since former President Nelson Mandela left office in 1999—whether under former Presidents Thabo Mbeki from 1999 to 2008 and Jacob Zuma from 2009 to 2018, or President Cyril Ramaphosa from 2018 to now—has had three distinctive features. First, solidarity with African countries and, more broadly, those of the Global South, with a commitment to the democratization of the institutions of global governance taking precedence over any support for the internal democratization of states. Pretoria’s muted responses to the proliferation of coups in Africa since 2020 and to the malpractice accompanying many African elections are illustrative examples. Second, a commitment to non-interference in the internal affairs of states replaced Mandela’s view that sovereignty should not be used as a shield to deflect criticism of a state’s human rights violations. Third, the promotion of multilateralism as the route to a more equitable world order and closer alignment with states seeking the same goals, whether in the Southern African Development Community, the African Union or the expanded BRICS forum. Underpinning each of those objectives has been a hostility toward the West in general and U.S. hegemony in particular.