SA’s coalition crisis may not be as bad as it seems

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JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa goes to the polls in early November, so just around the corner, and there is new research from the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection. It reveals that 80 municipalities have experienced a hung council since 2021, producing – and wait for this – 175 different administrations.

So what does all of this tell us about the election ahead, and are we heading for even greater political instability?

Welcome back to the programme, Dr Laurence Caromba, who is a researcher at the institute, lead author of its 2026 Coalitions Barometer. Laurence, welcome to you. With South Africa then voting on 4 November, are we heading again for a coalition crisis, or have we simply misunderstood how coalition politics actually work?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: Well, there are different trends that are pushing us in different directions.

In terms of the factors that are pushing us towards a coalition crisis, I think the issue is that we have this trend towards voter or party fragmentation where, with each political cycle, it seems South Africans are splitting their share of the vote amongst more and more parties.

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When we can see parties breaking away, if we think of things like the EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters) and later the MK (uMkhonto weSizwe) party breaking away from the ANC (African National Congress). You also have some parties breaking away from the DA (Democratic Alliance), like ActionSA and Bosa (Build One South Africa), for example.

So you have all this fragmentation and what that does is it creates more complicated councils with more parties needed to form a governing coalition, more divergent ideological worldviews within each coalition, and it becomes structurally complex.

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All of these things are things that we identify as risk factors for coalition survival in our data sets and analysis.

JEREMY MAGGS: So structurally complex. All well and good. But interestingly, Laurence, your research also suggests, if I read this correctly, that many coalitions are surprisingly stable.

So I wonder if we maybe are not exaggerating the problem simply because of the chaos that those of us who live in Johannesburg are experiencing?

LAURENCE CAROMBA: I do think that that is a real phenomenon, and this was honestly one of the most surprising things to me as a researcher.

If you’d asked me before this project, what percentage of coalitions that were formed after the 2021 election, what percentage of those survived in basically their current form for the next four years. I would have guessed that maybe like 5% at most would make it.

You read the headlines and it feels like coalitions are crashing every single day.

But actually, what we found is that in one third of that class of 2021, if you want to put it that way, those governments formed after that election, one third of those governments survived for the entire period that we keep data, up to February this year.

A third of those survived in basically the same form that they were created. There was another third that went through what we called at least one or more coalition rebuild.

So this is what basically happens, the coalition does change, but the core party in the coalition stays in power. It brings on new partners, it kicks some of the old partners out, it rearranges the coalition around itself.

But the lead member of the coalition remains in charge.

If you look at those two categories, that covers two thirds of the coalitions formed after 2021. So only one third of those coalitions are cases like what we had in Joburg, where the DA was in power, then the ANC, then the DA, then the ANC, you know.

Those are real phenomena as well but only one third of coalitions formed after 2021 have been through that sort of change. But those cases do tend to generate more interest from the media because they’re interesting cases.

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JEREMY MAGGS: I want to pick you up on that word rebuild. Again, correct me if my interpretation is incorrect here, but I would suggest to you, as that rebuild process is happening, if a coalition collapses, it’s the inertia and the inactivity during that period that creates the biggest sense of risk and inactivity, which will have an impact on things like service delivery.

LAURENCE CAROMBA: That is definitely possible. I think one of the fears of many South Africans – and it’s a fear of ours – is that with all of this coalition chaos at the top, what that will do is it will have the effect of eroding the state capacity of the governments that are actually supposed to be doing the service delivery.

Like, how can you have a consistent programme if the mayor is constantly being shuffled in and out of power?

But when we tried to measure this and we looked at municipalities that had the most coalition collapses, and we compared that to audit outcomes from the Auditor-General, that’s a useful metric, because it’s a standard metric that is applied to all municipalities.

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We couldn’t find a clear statistical relationship that municipalities that had experienced more collapses had also experienced worse outcomes. The evidence is really insubstantial.

It’s possible that we’re just looking at the wrong things and that we need to do more research. What we’ve done in this edition is we’ve created this data set, this research tool that we’re hoping will enable that. So I think this is a question that is uncertain to me right now.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let me ask you this. You find that excluding the largest party makes a coalition, I think you write, four times more likely to collapse.

Is the suggestion there that the biggest party should always get first shot at governing? But in real political terms, it might effectively reward the ANC, even when voters have deliberately denied it an outright majority.

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LAURENCE CAROMBA: No, that’s not what we’re saying. I think in our report we actually specifically say this isn’t saying that the largest party always deserves to rule by default.

Ultimately, the political parties can choose their own strategies. They need to look at the balance of seats in the council given to them by the voters and decide how to form the best government out of it.

But what I can do as a researcher is I can give my findings based on the data, and what the data shows very strongly is that if a coalition is formed, that does exclude that largest party, and by the way, we tested this in cases where the largest party is the ETA (…) or the IFP (Inkatha Freedom Party) or some other party, the effect is consistent.

It always makes the coalition more likely to collapse sooner.

I think there are obvious reasons for that. When you don’t have the largest party in your coalition, it means that you have to form a much more complicated coalition with more smaller members, more divide, more different viewpoints, and you have to put this large collection of parties together.

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Then, of course, the excluded party, the largest party in the council, is sitting just outside as an almost natural enemy of the new government, waiting to try to get back into power.

That creates a lot of political pressure, and a lot of governments don’t survive that test. So if parties want to choose to form this configuration of coalition, it’s a difficult task, and I think they will need to compromise more in order to make it work.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m going to leave it there. Dr Laurence Caromba, thank you indeed. Researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

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