The ANC went looking for a familiar friend on Thursday. The SACP left it standing in the cold.
Hours after ANC deputy secretary-general Nomvula Mokonyane named the communists as a party the ANC was ready to work with, the SACP made it brutally clear: it is in no hurry, it owes the ANC nothing, and if there is ever to be a new alliance, it will be on the SACP’s terms.
SACP spokesperson Mbulelo Mandlana delivered the message at the Results Operations Centre on Thursday, 5 November, with the calm of a party that has just proved it can survive without its big brother.
“The Communist Party has not made a decision about coalitions. Our approach is that we don’t want to start negotiating coalitions at this time. We must go back to the people who gave us a mandate and come to an understanding, an interpretation, of that mandate. We can decide to go into a coalition. We can also decide to be in the minority. We can decide on a number of options. We cannot, at this time, be making declarations that are final about coalitions,” he said.
It was a direct rebuke to Mokonyane.
Earlier on Thursday, Mokonyane had said the SACP would be “one of those parties we are open to engage with because it has contested elections”.
The ANC meant it as an olive branch. The SACP treated it as premature, presumptuous, and politically tone-deaf.
For decades, the SACP was the ANC’s junior partner, providing cadres, ideology and discipline while the ANC took power. That era is over.
The SACP is contesting elections on its own for the first time. It took the decision at a special national congress in December 2024, without leaving the tripartite alliance. On Thursday, it was reaping the first reward of that independence: the power to say no.
And behind Mandlana’s diplomacy sits a harder line from inside the party’s policy brain trust. SACP policy researcher Alex Mashilo has made the party’s new condition explicit: if the SACP is ever to enter into an alliance with the ANC again after these elections, the ANC must listen to them.
No more being lectured. No more being used as a voting machine. No more being castigated for thinking independently and then being called back when the ANC needs numbers in a council.
Mashilo’s warning captures the mood of a party that believes the ANC only discovers the value of the left when it is losing. For years, the SACP says, it warned about privatisation, austerity, cadre deployment failures and the hollowing out of the state. It was ignored. Now that the ANC is bleeding at the polls, it wants the communists to rescue it.
The SACP is not interested in a rescue on the ANC’s terms.
With about 46% of voting districts counted on Thursday afternoon, the SACP was ninth nationally on 2.6% of the PR vote, with more than 136,000 votes. In a crowded field, that is not a landslide. But for a first-time independent campaign, it is a foothold, and more importantly, it is leverage.
Mandlana admitted the ground had shifted against the alliance.
“The electoral environment has been shifting. The alliance itself has been witnessing that shift. The shift we are looking at today is part and parcel of an important shift that has somehow moved the progressive agenda and progressive forces into an unfavourable position,” he said.
“That does not mean the overall agenda and the principles we stand for have suddenly become illegitimate. It’s just that our people are giving us a new challenge,” he said.
He would not be drawn on the ANC’s own result, which stood at about 32%.
“The ANC will answer for itself and evaluate its position on this leaderboard. We will not do that for them. They have enough qualified people,” he said.
That refusal to carry the ANC’s water is itself a political statement. The SACP will not explain away the ANC’s decline. It will not share the blame. It will make the ANC own its record.
He said relations with the ANC had improved, but some members remained hostile.
“We think the relationship with the ANC is still positive. Coming into the elections, the ANC moved away from a castigating attitude towards the Communist Party’s decision to contest elections, to a more cooperative attitude. ANC leaders have at different times come closer to the Communist Party to say, look, the decision to contest elections is a decision we can respect, and we will not go around castigating it any longer. However, there are still members who have a very negative attitude, and we continue to work with them,” Mandlana said.
That “positive” relationship, however, does not translate into an automatic coalition. The SACP is using its new independence to force a rethink of the entire alliance model.
He said the SACP was doing best in the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape.
“It is quite clear, looking at the numbers so far, that we seem to be doing better in the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape. The metros in Gauteng are more contested. There are other new role players that have come into the fray. Our base in the Eastern Cape is much more long-standing and much more traditional,” he said.
In early Eastern Cape counts, the SACP was third on 5.5%, behind the ANC and DA, and leading in several wards. In Cape Town, it had about 0.3%.
“These elections show, preliminarily, that the Communist Party has a wide enough reach to have better prospects going forward. The Communist Party is not a regional party. It is a national party. The workers and the working class have shown that they back the Communist Party. What we have done today is the beginning of a bigger role in the national political space,” he said.