Twenty-eight years in, South Africa’s democratic order is in a bad place. Warning signs are to be found everywhere one looks. Several years after Jacob Zuma’s kleptocratic presidency, the state remains mired in corruption and mismanagement and is failing to reverse a catastrophic decline in basic services and infrastructure. Its security apparatus, deeply penetrated by criminal and seditious elements, seems powerless in the face of growing political violence and gangsterism. Populist parties are gaining ground, while demagogic, anti-constitutional voices increasingly dominate social media and fuel a new wave of xenophobic violence. Polls show collapsing support for democracy and growing receptiveness to authoritarian forms of government.

All of these morbid symptoms are well chronicled in a now daily stream of commentary issuing earnest warnings and dire prognostications about the fate of our democracy. These concerns are made far more acute by the gloomy international backdrop against which they are set. According to a growing consensus among political scientists, the world is in the midst of a “third wave of autocratization” ushered in by the 2008 financial crisis. That crisis definitively concluded the long expansive phase of democratization that had begun in the 1970s. Since then, fewer and fewer countries have seen any improvement in the health of their democratic institutions, while the number of places experiencing democratic “backsliding” has shot up.

Democracy’s retreat is conterminous with the globe-spanning rise of right-wing populism. Populists now control the government in numerous countries of the Global South, including major economies such as Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Turkey. In most cases, they assumed power through free and fair elections. But they’ve wasted little time in turning on and undermining those democratic freedoms once in office. Coups and full-blown dictatorships have been rare in the current authoritarian wave—its modal form has been the hollowing out of democratic institutions from the inside by incumbent governments. Populists have also claimed power in a handful of OECD countries, and have become a major electoral force in most others, often ending decades of duopolistic control by centrist parties.

The scope of these trends suggests that they are being propelled by deep structural forces. On the Left it is common to see populism as an expression of the intractable crises of the current, neoliberal stage of global capitalism. Neoliberalism’s most salient hallmarks have been soaring inequality and petering growth. It has given rise to both an unprecedented, decades-long stagnation in living standards at the bottom of the class ladder and a historically novel scale of wealth accumulation at the top. In this reading, populism is at root a reaction to the iniquities of our current Gilded Age, one that has assumed nativist forms due to the Left’s inability to offer meaningful alternatives to market-led globalization.

If it’s true that hard-edged economic forces are driving forward the populist tide then there is every reason to fear deeply for the fate of South African democracy. Even when measured against the subpar averages of the neoliberal era, post-Apartheid South Africa’s economic record has been exceedingly dire. Growth over the last decade has been negative in per capita terms. Inequality still registers higher than any other large economy. So does unemployment, by extraordinary margins. A jobless rate hovering for decades at levels normally only seen in the most severe recessions is the grimmest and most distinctive feature of South Africa’s economic malaise.

According to most analysts, the populist turn is already well underway here. Its main incarnation until now has been the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema. When the EFF launched in 2013, its “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian” program combined appeals to class and ethnicity in roughly equal measure. Since then, class issues have gradually fallen off in its agenda, while the racial identities it invokes have grown narrower and more chauvinistic, bounded by anti-Indian and now anti-foreign vitriol. It increasingly converges with the populist movement that gestated within the ANC during Jacob Zuma’s tenure, now organized under the banner of “Radical Economic Transformation” (RET).

The “Radical Economic Transformation” faction  also garbs itself in the symbolism of the Left, but its true nature is plain to see: it represents the most voraciously corrupt elements of the ANC, intent on reviving the Zuma-model of statecraft in which the fiscus is treated as a giant slush fund for the accumulation of “tenderpreneurs.” In the course of the last year, the RET faction lost several key battles in its fight with the group aligned to the ANC’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. But its continued vitality, and capacity for disruption, were demonstrated last July when it unleashed several days of chaos on the country following Zuma’s arrest for contempt of court.

Last November’s local government elections, in which support for the ANC sunk to its lowest levels yet, saw the sprouting of smaller new populist formations and ethnic parties. Notable among them is ActionSA, led by former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba. Mashaba is a self-made businessman and an open admirer of Donald Trump.  He first took office in 2016 as a member of the center-right Democratic Alliance (DA), the dominant white party, but split from it three years later, after it veered into culture-war politics and began purging most of its black leadership. In 2020 he formed ActionSA around a more conventional right-populist platform of anti-corruption and strident xenophobia. That message proved popular in November, winning the party an average of 16.1% in the wards that it contested in Johannesburg.

With South Africa’s economic and social crises magnifying each year, and with the populist tide sweeping forward unabated around the world, even in places of far less economic distress, it’s not hard to see why so many analysts feel that’s it’s only a matter of time before South Africa succumbs to an authoritarian movement promising order amidst the chaos.