Who will govern South Africa?

Cyril Ramaphosa will almost certainly remain as president. Yet he no longer inspires the country. In 2018 he promised a “new dawn” after nine years of graft and stagnation under his predecessor, Jacob Zuma (though Mr Zuma denies wrongdoing). The 71-year-old has brought an avuncular dignity to the presidency. He has replaced lackeys with competent leaders in several key institutions. He has tried to involve the private sector in fixing ailing power and freight infrastructure. Yet the six years have been largely disappointing, suggesting that his next term in office will be a let down, too. Rather than use his early popularity to rally South Africa behind difficult reforms he has instead indulged many of his party’s worst ideological instincts. The vagueness of the ANC’s election slogan—”Let’s Do More, Together”—reveals its lack of ideas about how to rejuvenate the country. Its manifesto is replete with banalities about how the state will fix things and right racial wrongs, even though a weak state is often the problem.

John Steenhuisen is the leader of the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, whose base is white and “coloured” (mixed-raced) South Africans. A pugilistic parliamentary campaigner, he became leader in 2019 having risen through the party’s ranks. The DA, a liberal party, has much better ideas than the ANC: it understands that the best way to alleviate poverty is to grow the economy and focus on disadvantage per se, not race. Yet such messages are a hard sell in a mostly black country where the legacy of apartheid lingers. Nor is Mr Steenhuisen a good messenger. Like many in the upper echelons of the DA—though not some of its younger local leaders—he seems more obsessed with the state of the ANC than the state of the country.

South Africans thought they had seen the last of Jacob Zuma in electoral politics. As president from 2009 to 2018 he was at the heart of “state capture”, the name given to the looting of state-owned enterprises and government departments. Yet the 82-year-old shocked many observers in December when he blessed a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), which takes its name from the ANC’s armed wing during the anti-apartheid struggle. Its policies are similar to those of the hard-left EFF, with an added dollop of tribalism: Mr Zuma is a Zulu, the country’s largest ethnic group. But policies are not really the point of MK; its aim is to sabotage Mr Ramaphosa and to give Mr Zuma a political base he can use to protect himself against potential prosecution for graft. On May 20th the Constitutional Court barred Mr Zuma from standing for parliament because of a criminal sentence he was given in 2021. The ANC hopes that will curb MK's appeal but a sense that the system is against their hero may only encourage the insurgent party's supporters.

Since being expelled from the ANC in 2012 Julius Malema has become the most notorious politician in South Africa. Though his Economic Freedom Fighters won just 10.8% of the vote in 2019 the party often dominates South Africa’s political coverage as a result of its eye-catching red uniforms, publicity stunts and inflammatory rhetoric against minorities. (“We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people—at least for now.”) Mr Malema’s pitch is that black people won political but not economic rights in 1994—and therefore, the country still needs a revolution. His party’s manifesto promises to nationalise “strategic” businesses and expropriate land without compensation. The EFF could form part of a coalition government in Gauteng, the province containing Johannesburg and Pretoria and, in a move that would terrify investors, perhaps nationally, too. Even if that is a remote possibility Mr Malema will continue to be an influential, and loud, voice in South African politics for years to come.

Velenkosini Hlabisa might be the only leader of a South African political party that does not have his face emblazoned on most of its posters. Instead the adverts for the Inkatha Freedom Party say “Do It For Shenge”, the clan name of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the founder and longtime leader of the IFP, who died in 2023, aged 95. Under apartheid Buthelezi ran KwaZulu, one of ten ethnically homogenous “homelands” created by the white regime to try to limit the black presence in South Africa. After apartheid he mobilised Zulu nationalism and his connections to the Zulu monarchy to win support for the IFP. Yet Mr Hlabisa, a mild-mannered former teacher, could become more prominent if his party emerges as the kingmaker in coalition negotiations.