The GNU may collapse before 2029

South Africa’s power-sharing government is facing mounting strains that could bring it down well before the end of its term.

Helen Zille, the DA’s federal council chair and one of the architects of the coalition blueprint, said in an interview with Bloomberg that the government of national unity (GNU) may not survive the full five-year term.

“I’m not confident that it will last until 2029,” she said. “There has got to be a change of ANC leadership before then, in 2027, and there are a whole lot of people in the ANC who don’t want it to last.”

The governing pact, forged after the African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 30 years, bound the party to its longtime rival, the Democratic Alliance (DA), as well as a cluster of smaller organisations.

While the arrangement steadied the political landscape after last year’s election shock, it has since been rattled by ideological clashes over taxation, and divisive proposals on land policy, health reform and education.

Zille, a veteran political strategist and former Cape Town mayor and Western Cape premier, was directly involved in negotiating the coalition’s operating framework.

She is now campaigning to become Johannesburg’s next mayor, with municipal elections due no later than January 2027.

The ANC has seen its support deteriorate over the past decade, achieving a record-low of 40% at the national polls in 2024.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has struggled to reverse the party’s fortunes despite retaining its status as the country’s largest political force.

The contestations

Attention has now shifted to Ramaphosa’s likely successors. His deputy, Paul Mashatile, and the ANC’s secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula, are considered early frontrunners for the leadership contest.

Neither has confirmed whether they will run, nor whether they would keep the ANC inside the GNU, whose stated priorities include job creation and revitalising the economy.

A new ANC leader who abandons the GNU could instead form an alliance with Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party or Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters.

Both advocate sweeping state control of banks, mines and major industries – a complete opposite of DA policies.

When the DA entered the GNU, it stated that it did so to ‘save the economy’ by keeping the aforementioned parties out of power.

“Yes, the elites are very stuck on race, but actually ordinary people want water and ordinary people want electricity at affordable prices and they want to be able to put a vehicle on the roads without destroying it,” she said.

The ANC and the DA have had several policy disputes within their fiest year of governing alongside one another, with the former official opposition threatening to withdraw from the coalition on numerous occasitions.

The two parties comprise roughly 85% of seats held by the coalition in the National Assembly.

Zille launched a scathing critique of the ANC’s governance record, accusing it of entrenching systemic graft. “They are morally bankrupt and morally bereft. It’s rotten from top to bottom and corrupt.”

While Ramaphosa has acknowledged corruption as a central challenge, he insists that his administration is making progress in confronting it.

In the Bloomberg interview, she argued that South Africa’s Black economic empowerment rules, originally intended to broaden economic participation, had instead created a narrow elite while sidelining minority groups.