The era of automatic ANC majorities is behind us. Electorally, South Africa is splintering, with a bevy of new ideologies and identities finding representation in Parliament.
But there remains a gaping hole in our political landscape: on the class-oriented left.
Followers of the red berets might object to that claim. Their party calls itself Marxist, and its programmatic documents are sprinkled with proposals traditionally associated with the left. But if we just consider what the EFF would actually do with power, any claim to progressivism melts away. A kleptocratic strongman, uninhibited by any semblance of internal democracy, will never deliver anything meaningful for working people.
The good news for actual progressives is that the South African public seems largely to agree. Never a major party, the EFF is dwindling.
Lingering odors of corruption, which have always wafted around its leader, must have a lot to do with this. But even before that became a major factor, the party was held back by the flimsiness of its commitment to the economic struggles that define the lives of its would-be constituents.
Sure, it talks about jobs. And if one pores over its documents, they might be able to reconstruct something of an economic plan. But they never prioritised these issues.
To the extent the party has claimed any lane, it’s one of racial animus and performative opposition to “whiteness”. Good for gaining ground on campuses and for frothing up a crowd – that was never going to be a platform for hegemonic politics.
For all the accusations of populism, Malema and the EFF have never been a party focused on the things that people care about the most – unemployment above all (corruption, depending which survey you look at, is often second in salience).
For the other recent pretenders to the mantle of the left politics, the branding problem is even worse. God knows what the uMkhonto Wesizwe party stands for in the minds of ordinary voters, beyond more kleptocracy.
That the South African instantiations of the global populist moment have been so weak – ideologically and, increasingly, organisationally – is a massive godsend for the country and for its struggling left.
No movement in the past 30 years has been able to break through on the ANC’s left flank because of the sheer extent to which that party monopolised political space – electorally and within civil society. If populists had quickly managed to fill the vacuum that the ANC is leaving as its control finally cracks, we might have found ourselves locked out of power for another generation.
As it is, many of those turning their backs on the ANC are drifting away from party politics together – or casting protest votes – rather than throwing in with left pretenders.
The momentum, such as there is, appears to be with the liberals more than anyone else. But the DA won’t become the next hegemon any time soon. Its whiteness, and its sermonising liberalism, are fetters it won’t easily shake.
A record of cleaner governance in an era of State Capture has given it an advantage, but it shows no greater interest than the EFF in making the experiences and concerns of ordinary South Africans into the lightning rods of its campaigns.
The space remains wide open for a party that manages to speak to the economic grievances that are by far the biggest of those concerns – while avoiding the cul de sacs of ethno-chauvinism and patronage politics.
Naysayers within the left tell us that such a party is not possible because the foundations for it don’t exist – unions and social movements are in a decrepit state.
But there is no law that says that parties must be the tail wagged by the movement dog.
When I moved to New York City in 2016 to start my PhD I joined the local branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In the desolate landscape of the American left the DSA was the biggest thing going – but in the wider scheme of things it was puny, barely 3,000 members, most of them “paper”. About 12 people attended the meeting.
Three months later the same meeting had more than 400 attendees. There’s only one proximate explanation for why they were there: Bernie Sanders’s run for president had electrified the nation and convinced millions of Americans that they no longer had to sit by and watch oligarchs trash their country and their futures.
Just a few years later the DSA reached 100,000 members. One of these, who joined a year after I did and cut his political teeth within its ranks, was elected mayor of New York City last month.
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign – rigidly focused on the issues that unify the working class, indifferent to the identitarian preoccupations of the “neoliberal left”, and innovative and energetic in bounds – produced so much worth emulating, even in a context as distinct as ours.
One of our biggest weaknesses is that we don’t have a Bernie, or a Corbyn or an Amlo (former Mexican president) – figures with national stature and the record of consistency and honesty that have allowed them to act as figureheads and catalysers of a new movement.
One rung below that, however, we’re arguably in better shape than the American left was before Bernie changed its fortunes.
Our unions are crisis-ridden and locked in a trajectory of long-term decline. But they still organise more than 3.5 million workers (~27% of the workforce, compared with ~5% in the US) and remain the largest democratic organisations in civil society.
Our social movements have fallen far from the heights they occupied about 20 years ago. But there are bright spots that remain. And there are the legacies that these and previous struggles have left behind in the form of ingrained cultures of radicalism, strong community networks and the lived experiences of seasoned activists.
Our campuses continue to produce militant and dedicated organisers – even if many of these get drawn into pseudo-left politics in the absence of any real alternative.
Bernie there may not be, but I have little doubt that there are hundreds of Zohrans within our ranks – charismatic, young, principled activists who could quickly become tribunes of a new left if given the opportunity by an organisation capable of identifying, training and deploying them.
Beyond this we have many more experienced leaders, who might not have the profile of an Amlo, but who have credibility, know-how and respect within activist communities. If they could put aside personal animosities, resist vanity projects and show a willingness to let new, younger faces in – they could become the nucleus of renewal.
Many of these figures, I sense, are held back by the many experiences of failure in post-apartheid party building – WASP, the SRWP, etc.
But, frankly, these examples are all completely besides the point. No one grounded in our current reality should ever have expected parties which run on a platform of violent, Bolshevik-style revolution to have been anything but a spectacular failure.
The sad fortunes of a left stranded in the imaginaries of the early 20th century tell us nothing about the prospects for a 21st-century left – a post-neoliberal left – rooted in democracy, oriented to the real concerns of workers and committed to challenging capitalism.
We now have plenty of examples to help us shape a vision of that left. In 2026, we must act. DM
Dr Niall Reddy is a senior researcher at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies, Wits University. His research focuses on comparative and international political economy, corporate power and the political sociology of finance, with a regional emphasis on South Africa. His work has appeared in the Socio-Economic Review, Competition & Change, the Review of International Political Economy and other scholarly journals.