FF Plus constituency ‘very sceptical’ of GNU, says new party leader Corné Mulder

Corné Mulder, the new leader of the Freedom Front Plus (FF Plus), says the party’s Afrikaner support base is “very sceptical” of the Government of National Unity (GNU).

Mulder said he believed the initial “positive” expectations the FF Plus’s constituency had about the GNU had waned in the 10 months since it was formed after the shape-shifting May 2024 election.

“There’s now lots of scepticism from our constituency about this,” he told Daily Maverick.

“It will be my task with my structures to not, with a knee-jerk kind of reaction, be irresponsible and say we move out. I won’t do that. We will have to evaluate and see if we can use this vehicle to the benefit of all. But then we need the larger players, specifically the biggest one, the ANC, to be prepared to say, ‘We are prepared to listen and we are prepared to make certain compromises’.”

Read more: ‘Our future lies in an independent Western Cape,’ says Corné Mulder of FF+

Mulder was elected the new leader of the FF Plus at its elective conference on Saturday, 22 February, succeeding Pieter Groenewald, who held the position since November 2016. Groenewald will continue to serve as minister of correctional services in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Cabinet.

Before that, Mulder served as the FF Plus’s chief whip in Parliament and the party’s Western Cape leader. He was one of the founding members of the Freedom Front when it was formed in 1994, under the leadership of retired General Constand Viljoen, as an Afrikaner nationalist party.

Mulder is also South Africa’s longest-serving member of Parliament, having first been elected to Parliament as an MP for the Conservative Party in 1988.

‘The first real test came with the Budget’ 

The FF Plus, with six seats in the National Assembly, entered the GNU with a stated aim of wanting to influence policy rather than seek positions. Mulder told Daily Maverick he was, at the time, perhaps the “strongest proponent” of the party joining the power-sharing arrangement.

“I was very much in favour, and the argument was, you have to be around the table where decisions are taken, decisions that influence the direction of the country, [and] where decisions may be taken about your community or your party or your support base,” he said.

Such a coalition was “exciting”, said Mulder, because with no party holding a majority it forced all parties to compromise and listen to each other.

But, he said, there was a problem with how the GNU was functioning.

Mulder said that, even though there was supposed to be a “middle ground” — a compromise between parties — in the government’s policies, the current situation seemed to reflect more of the ANC’s position and mandate rather than being a balanced approach. He referred specifically to core pieces of legislation like the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act (Bela), the National Health Insurance and the Expropriation Act — all of which have been strongly resisted by the FF Plus’s constituency.

Read more: The new Expropriation Act: SA’s chance to face its imperial past

This was causing concern for the party’s supporters, who are sceptical about the direction of the GNU.

Mulder said the FF Plus was trying to explain to its constituency that these Acts signed by Ramaphosa were passed under the previous Parliament, when the ANC still had a majority. He believed the implementation of new policies down the line would be even more challenging for the GNU, and said the National Dialogue was urgently needed to “find a common vision”.

“One could argue that the problems that we are dealing with now are inherited from the previous [government]. But somewhere along the line, we will start to get new legislation and new policies coming from the Government of National Unity. And I think that’s going to be the challenge,” he told Daily Maverick.

He pointed to the Budget as being the first major challenge for the government.

The Budget, which would have been tabled on 19 February, was postponed after parties in the GNU failed to agree on a proposed VAT increase of two percentage points. Parties including the DA and the FF Plus objected to Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana’s proposal to hike the VAT rate from 15% to 17%.

Godongwana has a deadline of 12 March to deliver a revised Budget to the National Assembly.

On Sunday, 2 March, the Sunday Times reported that the National Treasury was now proposing a 0.75 percentage point increase in VAT, with the support of the ANC, which warned that it would approach the EFF if parties in the GNU (particularly the DA as the second-largest party) did not back the move.

Read more: Time for a zero-based SA budget to cut the costs of corruption, politics and wastage

The Cabinet is expected to thrash out the proposal in a special Cabinet meeting on Monday, 3 March.

“The first real test came with the Budget, where it’s no longer the Budget of one party, it’s the Budget of the Government of National Unity, and you need to find a middle ground. And let’s see if there’s a middle ground to be found before 12 March,” said Mulder.

“The party [FF Plus] has said, we understand that we have to be part of the Government of National Unity, and that’s still the position. There’s a lot of questions, there’s a lot of scepticism, there’s a lot of pressure to say no. What the party is saying is, we will continuously evaluate the role that [we] can play in the Government of National Unity, and over time, if it becomes clear that for five years the ANC will pursue this and not listen to any of this, then you need to ask yourself the question: what am I doing here?”

No problem with Solidarity and AfriForum’s US trip 

Last week, the Afrikaans interest group AfriForum and the union Solidarity met with representatives of US President Donald Trump’s administration in Washington to ask Trump to aid an “Afrikaner development fund”, among other things.

The organisations delivered a “Washington memorandum” to the representatives, which included recommendations like continuing to place pressure on the government, with a focus on the “ANC leaders responsible” for SA’s foreign policy, pressuring the government to “declare farm murders a priority crime and to take decisive action against those calling for violence against Afrikaners”, and pressuring the government to revise the Bela Act, the Expropriation Act “and legislation that discriminates on the basis of race”.

Read more: Afrikaner group makes a sho’t right to Europe to campaign for more support against ‘SA race laws’

The groups’ tour to Washington followed Trump’s executive order that all foreign assistance be stopped and that his administration promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping what he claimed “government-sponsored, race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation”.

In a statement following the order, the FF Plus welcomed the pressure it put on the government to review the Expropriation Act, but said “its unintended consequences could be disastrous”.

Asked what he thought about AfriForum and Solidarity’s meeting with delegates from the Trump administration, Mulder told Daily Maverick: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all. I don’t. I don’t see that as disloyal. I don’t think it’s wrong.

“I think it is something that should be part and parcel of a democratic state — where people can go and do that.”

The FF Plus, AfriForum and Solidarity share many of the same ideological traits and their campaigns often converge around the same issues, such as land and language policies. But Mulder maintained there were no formal ties between the FF Plus and the organisations.

Read more: 

• AfriForum’s Kallie Kriel — there are land grabs in SA, not major land confiscations


• FF+ manifesto — Cape Exit, guns and community councils

“I think their larger support base is the same as our potential support base. But on a technical, practical level there’s no connection whatsoever,” he said. “That does not mean that there are no connections in terms of having interaction, having discussions from time to time. That needs to be done.” DM