2025: A turbulent year awaits SA amid global shifts

There will be sighs of relief as Old Man Time, circa 2024, shuffles into new year oblivion.

It’s been a year of the incredible, the inconceivable. What so many leaders and establishment analysts patronisingly assured us couldn’t, shouldn’t, and wouldn’t happen in fact could, would and did.

There are three standout events that most affect the way the South African story will unfold in 2025. In May, the ANC’s electoral support collapsed after 30 years.

A month later, over 90 humiliating minutes, President Joe Biden’s debate against Donald Trump unravelled years of lies about Biden’s mental acuity. Finally, in the past fortnight, a Syrian regime that had lasted 50 years collapsed in just days.

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What a reality check it has been for President Cyril Ramaphosa. At the beginning of 2024, everything seemed to be going swimmingly, both locally and abroad.

At home, the pain of years of rolling Eskom blackouts had ended and the opposition was divided. But, as it turned out, the general election was disastrous for the ANC.

The uMkhonto weSizwe party savaged the ANC, driving Ramaphosa into a de facto alliance with the DA.

Abroad, Ramaphosa bestrode the international stage, thumbing his nose at a Western bloc diminished in confidence and influence.

He had driven the expansion of Brics to include Iran and encouraged Brics to act more forcefully as a counterweight to Western “hegemony” and “neocolonialism”.

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Ramaphosa had bloodied Israel’s nose by getting the International Court of Justice agreed to countenance his claims of genocide in Gaza.

He was credibly demanding a (South) African seat on the UN Security Council, had offered to end the war in Ukraine and was confidently looking to more reputational kudos when SA rotated into the presidency of the G20.

Then came the reversals. The abrupt upending of long-held orthodoxies has left the world in turmoil and has made SA’s embrace of hard-left alliances with Russia and Iran – as well as the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah – looking at best unwise and, at worst, potentially disastrous to our long-term interests.

In the US, the Democrats’ confidence proved illusory. Donald Trump achieved a landslide victory winning not only the electoral college and the popular vote, but the Senate and the House, too.

In the EU there was a similar, albeit less unexpected move to the right. The European parliament for the first time came under the control of a conservative bloc.

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Centre-right parties took power in Austria, Portugal and the Netherlands and made substantial progress elsewhere.

There’s a seismic change taking place in the West. The often cited but rarely seen silent majority seems to be emerging from a decades-long slumber and they’re proving to be largely indifferent to the virtue-signalling issues that obsess especially the Anglophone elites.

It’s a development that threatens to leave in tatters much of the progressive agenda that has dominated the US.

It’s the Middle East upheaval, however, that has most dramatically reset the playing board, not only for the major players but also the fringe participants like SA.

There’s nothing to say that one incredible year cannot be followed by another.

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Ramaphosa’s unity government is precarious, vulnerable to determined efforts from his tripartite allies and his own party to wreck it. The consequences of this happening would be disastrous. We face a turbulent 2025.