President Cyril Ramaphosa meets with his GNU partners at the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng.
* GNU faced an unprecedented budget crisis, with the finance minister presenting the budget three times amid coalition deadlock.
* Ramaphosa’s 143-day absence from coalition meetings exposed a leadership vacuum, forcing emergency unity retreat interventions.
* Institutional failures, including broken dispute mechanisms, reveal a coalition surviving on electoral fears rather than partnership.
Eighteen months after its formation, the government of national unity (GNU) appears increasingly unstable, with mounting evidence that the 10-party coalition has struggled to deliver the stable and effective governance promised after the landmark 2024 election outcome.
A series of political, institutional, and economic crises throughout 2025 has exposed profound fractures in the coalition’s foundations, raising questions about whether the arrangement can survive mounting ideological disputes, leadership shortcomings, and administrative dysfunction.
The budget crisis: A constitutional breakdown
The most visible sign of the GNU’s dysfunction was the unprecedented national budget standoff earlier this year, when Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana was forced to present the national budget three separate times due to internal disagreements.
For the first time in the history of democratic South Africa, the budget speech was postponed from its scheduled date of 19 February to 12 March 2025, as various parties in the GNU, mainly the ANC and DA, remained deadlocked over a proposed VAT increase from 15% to 17%.
The crisis was so severe that the Johannesburg Stock Exchange lost approximately R1 trillion in value amid investor fears of political instability and escalating global trade tensions, specifically the announcement of new tariffs by US President Donald Trump.
When Godongwana presented the revised speech on 12 March, proposing a phased 1% VAT increase over two years, the DA and Freedom Front Plus again rejected the plan. The fiscal framework finally passed on 2 April, not with GNU unity, but with the support of ActionSA and Build One SA, both outside the coalition.
This budget impasse revealed the GNU’s fatal flaw: the absence of a comprehensive coalition agreement or effective dispute-resolution mechanism.
Unlike successful coalitions elsewhere, South Africa’s GNU was cobbled together hastily after the 2024 elections without establishing clear protocols for managing inevitable policy disagreements.
Presidential absence and leadership vacuum
Perhaps even more damaging to coalition cohesion were perceptions that President Cyril Ramaphosa had effectively abandoned his coalition partners. This was after it came to light that Ramaphosa had not met with GNU leaders for 143 days, despite repeated promises of regular engagement and consultation.
However, he made up for it when the leaders of the ten parties met at a retreat in October. Speaking to the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) after the meeting, Ramaphosa described the retreat as excellent and meaningful.
“We’ve been over 16 months into our relationship. Many people thought that we would have collapsed by now. Of course, we had our own challenges during this course of the 16 months, and we have reconfirmed that the GNU is here to stay.”
He also said: “There were moments of quiet, nice joy, and there were moments of serious talk, and it is in the serious talk that we emerged with a statement that will reflect precisely where we want the country to go.”
The fact that such desperate measures became necessary demonstrates the depth of leadership failure within the coalition.
The scheduling of regular coalition meetings, a basic requirement for any functional coalition government, has proven beyond the GNU’s capabilities, with partners citing conflicting diaries and a lack of coordination as persistent obstacles.
READ: GNU party leaders to meet in November for the first time in 177 days
Policy warfare and ideological deadlock
The coalition has also struggled to reconcile deep ideological divides. The ANC-DA relationship, critical to coalition stability, has deteriorated into public warfare over core policies.
The DA has declared formal disputes over the Expropriation Bill and National Health Insurance while engaging in provocative public campaigns against Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment policies. Meanwhile, the ANC has dismissed DA concerns and continued treating party policies as national government policies, undermining the coalition’s multi-party nature.
Ramaphosa’s dismissal of DA Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition Andrew Whitfield in June, following his visit to the US without Ramaphosa’s permission, further escalated tensions, with the DA viewing this as political retaliation rather than procedural governance.
Such actions demonstrate how personal and party interests continue to override coalition commitments.
Smaller parties loosing patience
The GNU’s instability has also triggered a cascade of withdrawal threats from smaller coalition partners.
The DA and the FF Plus also withdrew from the national dialogue, while the Patriotic Alliance also issued ultimatums over local coalition arrangements, threatening to leave the GNU in September when the ANC refused to reappoint the party’s deputy president, Kenny Kunene, as mayoral committee member for transport in Johannesburg.
Good and Rise Mzansi also expressed their frustration at the fact that the leaders were not meeting often enough.
The promised benefits of coalition governance – moderated policies, inclusive decision-making and consensus-building – have failed to materialise.
Institutional failures and broken mechanisms
The GNU’s institutional architecture has proven woefully inadequate for managing coalition governance. The clearing house mechanism, designed to resolve disputes, met only once in 2025 and failed to produce any meaningful resolutions. This institutional failure left coalition partners with no effective means of addressing grievances or managing conflicts.
But they finally now have the terms of reference, after operating without any since its establishment in September 2024.
The lack of such a mechanism saw the GNU come close to the brink of collapse several times amid policy misalignments and disagreements between the two largest GNU parties – the ANC and the DA. These were over land expropriation without compensation, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Act and the Employment Equity Act.
Among the proposals brought forward by the working group, which was established to formulate the terms of reference, were the following:
* The structure will operate as a recommending body – not a decision-making one.
* The clearing house will meet monthly.
* All unresolved issues will be referred to the political leaders’ forum, not President Cyril Ramaphosa. Parties must agree to disagree when consensus fails.
The absence of clear rules for coalition decision-making created a governance vacuum where ad hoc crisis management replaced systematic policy coordination. This institutional weakness becomes more pronounced as the 2026 local government elections approach, with parties increasingly prioritising electoral positioning over coalition commitments.
READ: GNU partners to ANC: ‘Sort out our problems before adding new partners’
A coalition in terminal decline
The evidence is overwhelming: South Africa’s GNU is not holding. From the constitutional crisis of the budget deadlock to the leadership vacuum created by presidential absence, from policy warfare between major partners to the exodus of smaller parties, every indicator points to a coalition in terminal decline.
Rather than providing the stable, effective governance South Africans desperately need, the GNU has delivered institutional paralysis, policy confusion and leadership failure. The coalition’s survival now depends more on a mutual fear of electoral consequences than on genuine partnership or a shared governance vision.
As South Africa faces mounting challenges requiring decisive leadership and clear policy direction, the GNU’s dysfunction represents not just political failure, but a betrayal of the democratic mandate entrusted to these parties by millions of voters seeking better governance.
The question is no longer whether the GNU will survive, but how much damage its inevitable collapse will inflict on South Africa’s democratic institutions and economic prospects.
