Deputy President Paul Mashatile is adamant the ANC will garner more than 50% of the vote on My 29, despite persistent speculation the ruling party has resumed informal talks with opposition parties about forming a government after the elections.
Speculation is rife after remarks by the leaders of the biggest opposition parties about the possibility of working with the ANC if no party is able to form a government.
DA leader John Steenhuisen said his party would work with the ANC to block an EFF-ANC “doomsday” alliance, while the EFF’s Julius Malema said this week that his party would help the ANC to form a government on condition his deputy, Floyd Shivambu, was made finance minister.
In an interview with the Sunday Times this week, Mashatile said such talks were premature, and that the ANC was focused on winning the elections with a clear majority.
Mashatile said he had been criss-crossing the country as part of the ANC election campaign and that, though South Africans had raised serious governance issues, he did not think they had given up on the ruling party.
“Well, I’m confident that we’re going to win the election. Of course, I can’t say [we will do it] with [a] two-thirds majority, but we will definitely [win] with a very decisive majority.
“Why I say that is because I’ve been travelling a lot in various provinces, regions and communities, and I found that there is a very positive mood out there in support of the ANC.
“Even where people raise very serious challenges, most of them don’t say, ‘We’re not going to vote’, but they say, ‘Please can [you] deal with the problem of load-shedding, water, roads’, and it differs from community to community,” he said.
“So they complain about issues, but I’m not seeing their position being ‘we’re tired of the ANC, we’re not going to vote’. So it will really depend on how decisively we move to deal with issues.”
He said the ANC would “definitely” get “over 50%” at the polls, and therefore coalition planning was not a high priority.
The Sunday Times understands that Mashatile has held informal talks with the EFF to establish if the two parties could work together after the elections
The Sunday Times understands that Mashatile has held informal talks with the EFF to establish if the two parties could work together after the elections.
Talks between the ANC and the EFF after the 2021 local government elections, which were led by ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula, then head of elections, collapsed after the EFF demanded that the ANC agree to its “10 commandments”, which include nationalising the mines and banks.
It has also emerged that a senior cabinet minister has held informal talks with the leaders of the DA about a possible coalition. But Mashatile d said that there had been no such talks.
“The national executive committee [NEC] has not come to that yet. It’s just a rumour that we have been tasked [with talking to other parties with a view to forming coalitions after the elections]. The NEC position is that we go into this election to win it, and to win it decisively. We will cross the bridge when we come to it. For now, we’re not talking to anybody about coalitions,” Mashatile said this week.
But the Sunday Times understands that both the ANC and the DA are avoiding public references to post-election collaboration for fear of alienating supporters.
“Only when the NEC asks me to do so [will I start negotiations],” said Mashatile. “They have not at the moment because we’re very confident we will win this election. We don’t want to give the impression that we are not sure, because once we start talking to others, it means we are not sure.
“They are not talking to us as well, by the way. Officially, they [the DA] have not approached us, and we are not going to approach them, because they believe they can win too. If other opposition parties are talking to the ANC, probably they are talking to certain leaders, but not the ANC officially. There are no such discussions as yet. We want to give our members confidence that they must go into this election to win it.”
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