Paper short abstract:

The contemporary South African scene is populated by a number of racial-majoritarian populist forces marked by left-right ideological eclecticism. This paper locates these movements in the global populist moment and the history of the global left.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa is currently roiled by a range of populist movements, including the Economic Freedom Fighters, Black First Land First, the Zuma wing of the ANC, Numsa and the 'fallist' student movement. These groups fight ostensibly dominant elites in the name of masses of people whom they claim are excluded from the post-1994 democratic dispensation. Like many populist movements globally, they tend to be majoritarian-democratic rather than liberal-democratic - they are polarizing, intolerant, hostile to liberal elites, militarist and engage in coercive mass mobilisation. However, a notable feature of the populisms examined here is that - like, say, Chavismo or Corbynism - they present themselves as leftist rather than rightist. They draw freely upon Marxist-Leninist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and even intersectional discourse. However, like conservative national populisms, they are also specialists in ethno-racial polarisation, mobilizing nativist sentiment against alleged alien interlopers. The result is ideological eclecticism, compounded often by political and ideological opportunism. This particular left-right eclecticism is not however unique to the contemporary South African scene: it joins the country's populisms less to any global populist moment than to a longer global history of left-right crossover movements and of movements allying the left to ethno-racial nationalism.