As seen in Germany and South Africa, PR coalitions, without a clear and mutually agreed plan for governance, are all too prone to devolve into infighting and paralysis. South Africa’s coalition not only runs this risk, but it is also setting a precedent as the first government in the country’s democratic history born from a governing party that failed to secure a majority.
No political system is perfect. All have their idiosyncratic strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities, being products of the unique domestic and international institutional context from which they evolve. This past week offered a revealing glimpse into how three very different democracies – those of the UK, Germany and South Africa – are trying to grapple with their respective realities and challenges.
Is Reform UK reshaping British politics?
First is the one that has perhaps been most melodramatically covered by the commentariat. In a set of local elections across the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK hammered the Conservatives and Labour in a result he subsequently said marked the “end of two-party [British] politics”.
In a set of English local election victories, Farage both dismantled Labour’s northern strongholds and annihilated the Tories in their former rural heartlands. “I believe we will win the next election,” Farage said last Friday, as Reform UK threatened a populist insurgency in Britain akin to those witnessed in the US and continental Europe.
For UK PM Sir Keir Starmer, the results were another reminder of how unpopular his government is. In a typically wordy response, he promised to speed up the delivery of policy reforms in areas such as migration, the NHS and industrial policy.
But these results were unequivocally more disastrous for the Tories and Kemi Badenoch, their jaded and confused leader. For them, the rise of Reform UK poses what one Tory shadow minister called an “existential” challenge, labelling the result “apocalyptic”.
UK politicians tend to get carried away. While the results are clearly a setback for the Westminster political elite, they are by no means surprising. Despite their crushing landslide in last year’s election, the headline numbers of seats won by Labour greatly overstated their popularity. Starmer was voted in with the lowest share of the popular vote in history. It is simply a consequence of the UK’s First Past the Post single-member constituency system which has resulted in a terminally unpopular, yet overwhelmingly powerful and unassailable government.
This is why those predictions such as Farage’s, that this represents the end of the road for two party politics, are likely to be as wrong as they have been in so many previous moments in the long history of British democracy. Instead, Labour do not have to call an election until 2029. By then, anything could have happened – indeed given Reform UK’s own institutional fragilities they are just as likely as the Conservatives to self-destruct. Instead, Labour has time to put in practice a program of economic and administrative reform which may give them a chance at rebuilding the trust of the electorate and winning another five-year term.
Whether or not they will do that, or are able to do that, remains to be seen. Either way, electoral reform is unlikely, and therefore systemically stable yet unpopular governments may continue to be the (arguably undemocratic) consequence of UK politics.
Shock in Germany
The European system of proportional representation, and the painstaking and laborious consensus and coalition building negotiations that it entails, has meanwhile been on show in Germany. Early on Tuesday, Friedrich Merz failed to win a vote in the Bundestag on Tuesday to become Germany’s chancellor, in a shock and completely unprecedented setback. Clearly members of his coalition had defected. Never had this happened in post-war German politics.
The upset came after a similarly unprecedented election result in February, where the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) finished second to the centre-right CDU. After the vote, AfD members were laughing loudly in the Bundestag.
Then later on Tuesday, Bundestag members agreed to hold a second vote. This time Merz clinched it, responding with brief comments: “Thank you for the trust. I accept the election.”
Regardless of his eventual election, the macabre charade has exposed the fragilities that come with PR systems, particularly those exposed to the sorts of stresses which Germany is currently experiencing. Merz’s popularity ratings have plummeted since the election, with some polls showing the AfD now leading the CDU.
That this vote only comes after the CDU spent around six weeks in negotiations with the centre-left SPD, who by most accounts won the negotiations, is indicative. The party of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who finished a distant third to the AfD in February, managed to secure no fewer than seven key Cabinet posts, among them the critical positions of defence minister, vice-chancellor, finance minister and labour minister.
Hopefully this will be a temporary setback, and the new government will prove to be more stable and aligned than it currently looks. Either way, post-war German democracy has never looked more fragmented and divided.
This is a pity. Facing the challenges of rearmament, a stagnating economy and an energy crisis, Germany needs a stable government more than at any point in its post-war history. If not, much like Reform UK, the AfD lurks in the wings.
Worrying precedents for the GNU
Finally, there are the travails of another PR system. That is the makeshift coalition which is the South African government, the so-called Government of National Unity (GNU). It has had an equally tough few months.
Since early March, South Africans have waited for a National Budget. While this is not a constitutional crisis, the series of legal wranglings that have played out over the past few weeks are concerning. They set a dangerous precedent for how coalition politics may evolve in SA, marked less by cooperation than by obstruction.
The ongoing deadlock over Budget 2025, largely hidden from public view and increasingly settled in courtrooms, is likely to be the first of many such impasses. As Stephen Grootes has argued in Daily Maverick, what’s to stop any coalition partner from threatening legal action whenever their interests aren’t met?
Whether or not any economic clarity can emerge from the current deadlock is unclear. The biggest risk that South Africa runs now is not the wrong decisions getting made, but no decisions being made.
The tragedy is that this coalition government had an opportunity to create a precedent for SA coalition politics for decades to come. But this would have required serious and transparent post-election negotiations. Instead, in an apparent effort to save face, President Cyril Ramaphosa hastily assembled the GNU, lacking anything resembling a shared policy agenda.
As seen in Germany and South Africa, PR coalitions, without a clear and mutually agreed plan for governance, are all too prone to devolve into infighting and paralysis. South Africa’s coalition not only runs this risk, but it is also setting a precedent as the first government in the country’s democratic history born from a governing party that failed to secure a majority.
The greatest risk that PR governments run, unlike the more stable, if less accountable, First Past the Post systems like the UK, is that they often generate noise without results. After decades of inertia, worryingly that is precisely what South Africa cannot afford. DM