(Note: this post has been weeks in draft, and is not a response to whatever the most recent thing to have happened is)

Introduction

In recent months, various groups have spun a narrative that portrays White South Africans as helpless victims of a racist and almost tyrannical government bent on their persecution.

Most of the rebuttals to this claim emphasize the exorbitant economic power that White people continue to hold in South Africa. These rebuttals are indeed evidence against the persecution narrative. However, they are not strong enough on their own. The wealthiest strata within societies can and often have been targeted for vicious persecution in other countries.

The safeguard against that kind of persecution is a liberal democracy, with Constitutional protections against exploitation and institutions that implement the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Minority groups can leverage such institutions and laws to protect themselves, and, together with their wealth, that forms a much more secure protection against exploitation.

South Africa is a liberal democracy. This liberal democracy has, on paper, some of the best institutional designs you can find. In practice, it has weathered the severe tests of a populist challenge ten years before it started happening in other parts of the world. And in the present moment, it has achieved the major milestone of a proportional-representation Parliamentary democracy – the transition to true power sharing. In 2024, the ANC lost its majority in Parliament. It is now unable to even pass a budget without the real input of coalition partners.

The goal of this post is to put aside the question of wealth and focus on politics and the political status of White South Africans within South Africa's democracy. Are they really able to exercise their rights within that democracy or not?

Demographics and History

Here is a brief primer on White South African demographics and politics, for people without context

• White South Africans make up about 7% of the population
• White South Africans are divided into two groups: Afrikaners (descendants of Dutch people) and English (descendants of British settlers)
• Afrikaners are the the numerical majority at about 60% of White South Africans
• There are other much smaller White ethnic groups, including Portuguese, Greeks and Jewish South Africans (mainly descendants of 20th century immigrants from Lithuania)

Most White South Africans vote for a party called the Democratic Alliance (DA). This is a cosmopolitan, urban, classical liberal party. It is descended from the small anti-Apartheid White parties that existed before 1994.

Before the Democratic Alliance, most White South Africans voted for the National Party, which is the party that created Apartheid. The anti-Apartheid predecessors to the DA never won an election during Apartheid. But after Apartheid, the National Party collapsed. It wasn't banned or anything. The party just fell apart. Most of the former voters of the National Party ended up voting DA. By adding National Party voters to its liberal core, and then adding a small number of Black voters to the resulting mix, the DA has grown to achieve 21.8% of the vote in the most recent general election.

The ideological core of the DA leadership is still largely White, classical liberal, anti-Apartheid White people. They can be tone deaf, paternalistic, and racially insensitive at times. But they are getting better in terms of racial sensitivity – the new crop of leaders are much more charismatic and approachable. The party leadership is still disproportionately White, as are its members, but it is diversifying gradually. It is not simply a 'White party' as its critiques claim. But it is not always as non-racial as it professes. What isn't much in dispute is that they are technocrats who run municipalities well and achieve clean audits consistently.

There is another organization you really need to know about: Afriforum.

The Trump administration's engagements have largely been driven by engagements with Afriforum, which is not a political party. They are an Afrikaner conservative lobby group who have been influencing Trump and the Republicans going as far back as 2018. If we are being charitable, what they want is something like an Afrikaner Quebec. But they are adamant about it being in South Africa, and do not want Afrikaners to move to the United States or become Americans. This goal seems to have been lost in translation across the Atlantic.

The DA believe that the future for White South Africans is within South Africa, not in an enclave, but mixed up together with everybody else. Their ideal country would be liberal in economics and politics, emphasize rule of law and individual rights and governed under a non-racial federalism. This is not what Afriforum believes in and not what they want. Afriforum want distinct cultural communities and autonomy or self-determination for each community, defined culturally or ethnically.

Even though Afriforum is not a political party, there is a political party made up of basically people from the same political heritage called the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). If White South Africans wanted the Afriforum formula, they could have voted from the FF+ over the DA at any point in the last 30 years. They did not. When the National Party collapsed, its voters broke for the DA. The DA beats the FF+ handily: one poll estimate the DA wins over 70% of White votes. Afriforum's supporters definitely overlap with the DA's right wing, but the majority of White voters have clearly expressed support for the DA's vision of their future and rejected Afriforum's grand plan.

This is the first takeaway from the piece. Whatever you are hearing in the news or on Reddit or wherever, you should remember that the 'Afrikaners' in the headline are usually just a specific organisation claiming to speak on behalf of all Afrikaners or, implicitly, all White people. The only organization that can actually claim to have a mandate from Afrikaners or White people as a whole is the DA. And they are invested in the idea that you win at the ballot and institutions.

The question is whether this belief is realistic. Do White South Africans really have a chance at participating fully in the political system or not?

Representation

In the current cabinet, there are 6 White South Africans out of 32 cabinet ministers. Including the President and Deputy President, who are both Black, the Cabinet is 6/34 = 17.6% White. This is more than double their share of the population.

4 of these ministers are from the DA, 1 is from the FF+ and 1 is from the ANC.

The portfolios they run are:

• Home Affairs (identity documents and immigration)
• Environmental Affairs
• Agriculture (excluding Land Reform and Rural Development)
• Public Works & Infrastructure
• Transportation
• Correctional Services (Prisons)

There are also White South Africans represented as Deputy Ministers. The Deputy Speaker of Parliament is White. And, obviously, there are many MPs who are White, including some who chair Portfolio Committees. And of course, many judges are White. White professionals also staff major companies, NGOs and have professional roles that means that non-White organizations tend to rely on them to get things done. Rich White individuals like the Oppenheimer family and Martin Moshal also contribute generously to political parties.

This is the first time the DA is in Cabinet. Prior to the 2024 election, the ANC never had to work with anybody else because they always won majorities in Parliament. But in 2024 they achieved only 40%, and had to form a coalition. They chose to work with the DA and a few other smaller parties.

There are two smaller parties which a pro-market, business minded person of any race might join:

• Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) [in the coalition]
• ActionSA [not in the coalition]

IFP is a pro-business, liberal-conservative party that used to be very popular amongst Zulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal. That is still their base, but they are not the largest party in that constituency. Think of them as Zulu Tories, but they advocate for much more substantive involvement by traditional chiefs and kings while still being Constitutionalist and democratic. They are very protective of the land which the Zulu king holds in trust for Zulu people, and they oppose laws like the Expropriation Act as a result of their suspicion of the central government and a respect for private property rooted in conservative-traditionalist reasoning. IFP doesn't do as well amongst non-Zulu speaking voters because of their involvement in violent conflicts against the ANC in the 90s.

ActionSA is a DA breakaway party, led by a self-styled Capitalist Crusader. Predictably, they often feud with the Democratic Alliance. But they have similar policies. They want to scrap some of the ANC's Black Economic Empowerment policies, which impose incentives and penalties to drive companies to have more diverse ownership structures, and replace them with a community investment driven approach.

Both IFP and ActionSA are open to White members and leaders. Liezl van der Merwe is an Afrikaner woman who serves as an IFP MP. ActionSA's Parliamentary caucus is made up of 2 out of 6 White leaders. Their national chairperson, Michael Beaumont, is White. He is the person who actually speaks on behalf of the party most of the time.

Finally, it's important to note that not all White people are liberals, centrists or right wing. Left-wing White people can vote for any of the left wing or social democratic parties including:

• ANC
• GOOD
• EFF

It's worth noting that this is not the first cabinet with White people in it. In the past, there were several White MPs even under ANC majorities. They were just… well, members of the ANC. Rob Davies) is an example. He ran the powerful Department of Trade and Industry from 2009 2019. This ministry is responsible for, amongst other things, affirmative action. So for an entire decade spanning the Zuma industry, the guy who oversaw South Africa's affirmative action policies was a White man!

GOOD is a younger party, and a DA breakaway. It only has one seat in Parliament, but if it had a second its deputy leader is a White man by the name of Brett Herron.

The EFF is a surprising addition here, but the fact is that there is a small number of far left White people (probably only a handful) who do vote EFF. We know this because every election cycle the media like to interview one of them if its a slow news day. Also there is a White man who represents the EFF in Parliament. He is, in fact, an Afrikaner, and was an anti-Apartheid activist in his youth. Carl Niehaus was previously a member of the ANC, and even served as national spokesperson for the party for a few years, before he jumped ship to the EFF.

White South Africans are well represented in the political system, but only proportional to their number and their ability to organize and coordinate with others. For some people, that equality can feel like persecution, but it's not. It's democracy. Given that most of our political parties have shown an ability and willingness to work with White individuals, and let them occupy positions of power and leadership, it is unreasonable to talk about the situation in South Africa as if White people have no recourse to South African institutions or political power.

I'm not saying that 7% is the same as 60%. I'm saying that people talk as if White people can't even run for office and that's just not true. 7% is not 60% – unless you build a politics that can accommodate others and get you to 60% one way or the other. And that is, actually, a reasonable ask of any group.

Majority

Back to the DA. So, their job is to build a coalition majority that can allow them to govern South Africa and implement policies that, in their view, will spur growth and make race and racism both a thing of the past – for all groups. So how are they doing?

Well, as of May of 2025: very well.

A poll commissioned by a think tank placed the DA ahead of the ANC for the first time in the history of the poll. The result was basically a tie, and well within the margin of error, but it was received as an absolute political earthquake in South Africa.

The reason for this was because the ANC's Finance Minister proposed a 2 percentage point hike in VAT, and the DA (as well as the EFF) fought it. This action sent the ANC's popularity plummeting, and resulted in a healthy and clear bump for the DA (as well as the EFF).

Fighting against an increase in prices, whatever the merits of the argument, will always make a political party more popular.

Perhaps too enthusiastically, some commenters have started asking whether the DA can actually govern the country as the leading party. With this comes the natural thought that a DA government would likely mean South Africa having its first White President. This might sound completely unrealistic, but consider that Julius Malema of the radical Marxist EFF has threatened to bring about exactly that scenario if the ANC doesn't give in to his demands. He has said he would support a motion of no confidence to remove the ANC and abstain from the subsequent vote for a new President, handing the DA the Presidency even before 2029 by his math. He's saying all this in a kind of racist way, but he's still saying it.

It's worth pausing to appreciate the trajectory here, even if you find these prediction outlandish. The mere fact that they are being discussed openly is a stunning accomplishment, and a far cry from what many people around the world assume the politics of South Africa is like, as far as White people are concerned.

One year ago, people were wondering whether the ANC would give up power in the unthinkable scenario that they lost the majority. Now people are musing or dooming or threatening each other with the prospect of a White President in 2029. The ANC didn't switch on the money printers when the going got tough – before the election they implemented austerity and after the election they are no implementing tax increases across the income distribution. These tax increases, which the ANC billed as fiscally responsible, were defeated by the DA and EFF together in court. Is any of this what you would have predicted for South Africa, based on what you hear about the country?

Where we are today is that the DA is a party which is actually in Cabinet, is increasingly seen as a normal part of national politics, a partner to the ANC and a potential governing alternative. As soon as the ANC slipped up, the DA's support shot up to 30% – challenging the ANC. The prospect of a DA government before 2029 is probably just a fun thought experiment. The prospect of a DA government in 2029 is something entirely within the realm of reason if nobody does anything stupid.

Accidental Sabotage

Unfortunately, the DA have a bit of a pattern. They do well in an election, and then something racial happens, and then people are spooked and they lose momentum.

I want to remind you that if there is any organization that commands the mandate of White South Africans, it is the DA. But Afriforum, the conservative lobby group, has spread such deep misinformation in the US that both Congress and the Executive have proposed taking action against South Africa, ostensibly on behalf of Afrikaners.

The net effect has been that the lives of the DA ministers have been made harder, in my opinion.

Start with John Steenhuisen, the party leader and Minister of Agriculture. After the first wave of Trump tweets about South Africa in early 2025, U.S. Congressmen wrote a letter encouraging Trump to take action against the "ethnonationalist gangster regime" of Cyril Ramaphosa by removing South Africa from AGO. Steenhuisen then had to pen a letter in Business Day explaining that the loss of AGOA would be disastrous for the citrus industry. The U.S. would probably exempt critical minerals from those tariffs, but not farming outputs. It would be farmers and farmworkers who would suffer immediately, and it is now Steenhuisen's job to juggle this mess. All of this drama was before the universal tariffs introduced by Trump.

Steenhuisen's colleague at Basic Education is Siviwe Gwarube. Basic Education is an important portfolio – the ANC draws lots of support from labour unions, and public school teachers are a core part of that group. Gwarube needs as much space and political capital as she can to build a relationship with the unions over time. Schools are also such a tangible issue for millions of people across the country, that if she performs well in that role, it would result in a bump for the DA amongst the kind of people who do tend to be more centrist and pragmatic and less radical – parents of young children. She should not have the focus on the drama around the BELA Bill. This fight is basically around the issue of language policies in school. Afriforum wants to prevent the government from being able to ask Afrikaans medium-only public schools to introduce an English medium if the demographics of the community are diverse enough that Afrikaans-only doesn't make sense. I have seen more extreme positions in favour of English-medium education being made by people on this sub – the BELA Bill is a nothingburger and not worth the time or political capital of the Minister.

Then there is Elon Musk, who is trying to get a Starlink license in South Africa. The South African venture of SpaceX has run into the issue that Black Economic Empowerment laws require that such a large company must have at least 30% ownership by historically disadvantage groups in order to get a license. The ICT Minister is, again, a member of the DA, Solly Malatsi. He is trying to find a work around for this because he is eager to bring in Starlink as a way of bringing internet to poor communities. Something like that could be a significant and visible win for the DA. We don't have to debate the merit of these laws for empowering Black South Africans. My point is that Malatsi should have the time, space and political freedom to try and figure something out. But instead, Elon is tweeting and agitating that he is not being allowed to operate in South Africa only because he is not Black.

The DA is never going to get to govern South Africa if it is not given the space and political freedom to make short term compromises for long term power. The ANC also had to 'sell out' (i.e. compromise) to get where it eventually got.

But what's even worse than the pressure to spend time and political capital on relatively minor issues is the political framing.

We have seen that when the core issues are bread-and-butter and good governance, the DA does well. Why are Afriforum and other groups dragging the DA back to racially charged questions where it does badly?

Why do they want to make it seem like DA Ministers are there to help literally the richest man in the world, who actually did benefit from Apartheid era advantages as a White South African, get around the laws designed to include Black South Africans in the economy.

Allow me to channel my inner median voter for just a second: "Sure look these Whites are efficient at some things but immediately we let them in and America is sanctioning us and trying to interfere? What's with that? Like it doesn't even make sense. We did what the Americans wanted and we put their people in and now we're getting attacked for it. Like… make it make sense?"

From the viewpoint of the median voter, what is happening is exactly what people have always warned, worried and doomed would happen once you let the DA in: they just want more and more power and privileges for richer White people at the expense of poorer Black people, like the AIDS patients Trump and Musk defunded as an indirect consequence of all the anti-South Africa lobbying.

Even if all you care about is the political advancement of White South Africans, this is all extremely stupid.

Conclusion

South Africa is a rapidly consolidating liberal democracy where its racial and ethnic minorities have been able to acquire real power. Predictions of violent retribution against Whites have not come true for decades now, but the people who make those predictions never have to account for their errors. By contrast, we went from "the ANC will never lose" to "they won't give up power peacefully" to "obviously they'll work with the EFF" to "they'll absorb and destroy the DA" to "maybe the DA will get more votes but the ANC will still be in charge" in less than a year. Despite this, cynical attitudes refuse to budge and update their beliefs.

I hope that the basic numbers I have shown will help those who know nothing about South African politics to realize that, at the very least, White people are so intimately involved in the political arena that the most outlandish claims of White oppression just can't be true. Even some of the more modest claims of oppression fall flat once you dig deeper. White South Africans are the richest group in the country, and have political power proportionate to their engagement and number. There are issues which affect them disproportionately, mainly owing to the need to undo the effects of Apartheid. Specific ANC policies to do that can be harmful or even outright unfair. But there is an enormous array of tools available to White South Africans to address these, from courts to legislature to Cabinet – and White South Africans themselves are well represented in all of these institutions. These tools are slow because South Africa is a democracy and White people occupy no special place ahead of others – they have to build coalitions to get what they want. They are doing that, but the very people claiming to help them are actually sabotaging the most serious organization making real headway.

The future of White South Africans is as one part of a diverse, multicultural, non-racial liberal democracy with a hopefully booming economy and a well entrenched culture of human rights and individual liberty. There is a real shot at building this society within our lifetimes, and we have come so far already. The challenges we are facing are not that big in comparison to what we have already overcome and compared to what our institutions and systems are equipped to overcome. But people have to actually have the basic decency to inform themselves and think critically, rationally, pragmatically and long term. We are not going to resettle 5 to 7 percent of a middle income country in another country, and not when that percentage is the most economically advanced and entrenched group in the country. These are not random farmers or destitute people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. They aren't leaving.

All of this is a waste of time and a distraction from the various serious politics of building a liberal coalition inclusive of but not privileging to White South Africans, which can deliver breakneck growth for everyone. Do that, and most of the concerns of most groups will be resolved within a decade.