South Africa’s new coalition partners have different outlooks on international relations

Cobus van Staden
June 18th, 2024

For the first time in 30 years, South Africa’s government won’t be the sole purvey of the ANC. Cobus van Staden looks at what effect this will have on the country’s foreign policy.


The news that South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) has agreed a coalition government with the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) and smaller parties ended weeks of furious speculation about the future of South African domestic politics. The announcement puts many doubts to rest, while immediately raising new ones. Specifically, how will the coalition affect South Africa’s relationship with external partners, at a moment of heightened and increasingly zero-sum geopolitics?

This question is triggered by the ANC’s unique role in South African society as the leader of the anti-apartheid movement. It is frequently described as a broad church, and in the narrow sense, it helped to bring disparate political groups into the same pew. In the 30 years since apartheid, the ANC was to South Africa what the Catholic Church is to Italy: a meta-institution at the heart of the society through which capital, power and identity flows.

Sino-African relations


This aspect of the ANC’s role made it a crucial, if complex, partner to external governments. Take China, for example. While they are very different institutions, the ANC and the Chinese Communist Party share a central role as the authors of national identity after periods of profound instability.

This similarity aided the rapid development of China-South Africa relations. In the 25 years since the normalisation of relations, South Africa became China’s most important partner on the continent, a key base for Chinese companies and a fellow BRICS member.

However, Chinese diplomats and other high-level stakeholders frequently expressed frustration, in private, about the last decade of ANC rule. These Chinese officials complain about the country’s crime and security problems, its powerful unions and its red tape, especially the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment rules aimed at tackling structural racial inequality resulting from apartheid.

This was partly the result of the ANC’s broad-church effect. The party’s policy decisions reflect behind-the-scenes politicking among groupings with starkly different agendas. These are further complicated by rent-seeking by individual officials, complex race/ethnicity/class dynamics, and wildly differing regional constituencies.

The search for coalition partners similarly reflected internal wrangling about the ANC’s own future. President Cyril Ramaphosa made a show of speaking to a broad range of parties. Two that used to be inside the fold (the leftist Economic Freedom Front, led by former ANC youth leader Julius Malema, and the new uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party led by ex-president Jacob Zuma) effectively eliminated themselves. The EFF demanded control of the Finance Ministry, and MK called for Ramaphosa’s resignation which made them easy to sideline, despite significant support within the ANC.

That left the DA, who won 20.8 per cent of the vote and was careful to temper their demands to core issues around property rights and an independent central bank. These are in line with business-friendly measures championed by Ramaphosa.

The coalition will likely please external partners. The linkup with the DA, the logic goes, could hold back some of the ANC’s corruption through increased transparency, and promote the needs of big business in the hopes of increasing growth and employment.

In the short term, this will be welcome news for Chinese stakeholders interested in a more stable, predictable and pragmatic South Africa, with functioning electrical and logistics systems that ensure manufacturing by Chinese carmakers in the Eastern Cape and exports of raw cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to refineries in China via the port of Durban.

However, in the longer term, complications await. The DA has long raised doubts about the ANC’s close cooperation with Russia and China and its BRICS membership. Before the election, some DA officials said they want South Africa to withdraw from the group.

The past and present


Many in the ANC maintain strong historical relations with Russia. This goes right back to apartheid, with the USSR’s long support and training of the liberation movements still standing in stark contrast with how the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations propped up the racist system as long as they could. To the US, UK (and Russia) of today, this may seem like arcane history, but it resonates powerfully in South Africa.

China is a relative newcomer in this context. Unlike other African liberation movements (for example, Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF) China wasn’t the ANC’s key supporter under apartheid. Formal ties date from the post-apartheid era, and from the start these were political and business based.

The current ideological alignment between the two countries is fuelled by more recent history, for example, the global financial crisis and the NATO invasion of Libya. In other words, the China-South Africa relationship is a 21st century one, shaped around current disputes triggered by the waning of Western unipolar power and the return of multipolarity.

Our current geopolitical moment is characterised by open lobbying for influence in the Global South by the Western alliance and opposing powers like China and Russia. China’s rise as not only a global military power but also an alternative norm-setter, technology-provider and project-financer sets up a global referendum on the future of the West’s power in the Global South.

The history of apartheid can’t be separated from this. The ANC-led government has been ready to publicly oppose Western positions, for example on Israel. The DA is the exact opposite. It has a pro-business mindset and is frequently indifferent to the social justice issues that preoccupy many ANC officials.

An ANC-DA coalition could smooth the way for international (including Chinese) business. But it could also make the country’s position in the geopolitical landscape more complex, by introducing more vectors of influence at the highest levels of power. This will be true even if (as is expected) the ANC retains control of the foreign policy portfolio.

In the end, the current coalition anxiety reminds us of a fundamental aspect of South Africa’s national DNA. It straddles the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. It’s Janus-headed, facing both East, to Chinese state-centric developmentalism, and West, to liberal human rights activism with all its contradictions and compromises.

Both the US-EU-UK coalition and China are irreplaceable partners to South Africa. The ANC-DA coalition contains partners that sit on either side of this divide. How the balance of power shapes up in the coalition will have widespread implications for South Africa and its foreign relations.

About the author

Cobus van Staden is the managing editor of The China-Global South Project, a Ford Foundation-supported startup tracking China’s engagement across the developing world. He is a research fellow at the US Institute of Peace and Stellenbosch University’s Department of Journalism. His work focuses on Chinese messaging and public diplomacy in Africa.