Cometh the hour, cometh the man — in Pretoria as in Paris

Last Sunday heralded the promise of real political change in France and South Africa. Tony Leon analyses the parallels and differences

There's a pessimistic French expression, plusça change, plus c'est la même chose - the more things change, the more they stay the same. Two unrelated political events exactly one week ago will - depending on your viewpoint and how the events they trigger play out - either confirm or invalidate that aphorism.

First, in France itself, an apparent electoral earthquake erupted on Sunday evening when the results of the first round of the French presidential election were announced.

For the first time since 1958, when Charles de Gaulle inaugurated the modern French Republic, both the traditional conservative and socialist parties were unceremoniously bundled out of the contest for the final round of presidential elections this coming Sunday.

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The candidate who finished first in last Sunday's contest, Emmanuel Macron, famously won the first round in the first such election in which he has ever participated.

At just 39, he is on course to become the youngest president of France so far.

He could also invigorate a sclerotic Europe.

Even more remarkable is the fact that in a country where the hand of tradition rests heavily on political formations, Macron essentially does not have a political party.

He created one a year ago - his En Marche! movement - which has now upended the 60-year left/right duopoly of French power.

The only person left standing in the way of Macron's triumphal march to the Élysée Palace is far-right National Front candidate Marine le Pen, who finished second last week and will face him in the final round.

Since most of the other candidates have thrown their weight behind Macron, the opinion polls suggest he is heavily favoured to win the ultimate prize.

Some qualifications can be added to the apparent breeze of youthful change that a likely Macron win suggests.

Although not of the traditional, or any, political establishment, Macron himself - elite educated, a successful banker and a one-time political protégé of outgoing French president Francois Hollande - is a poster boy for the status quo. His vague political promise of economic reform sits alongside a deep commitment to the EU project.

Still, in a continent roiled by populist forces, there now appears to be a pushback against the extremes registered in the Brexit vote last year and the waves that angry nationalists and Islamaphobes such as Le Pen hoped to surf to electoral success.

Debate will rage for a while yet about whether the angry voices and votes of the pessimists - those left behind by the forces of globalisation and most vulnerable to immigrant job seekers - have been stilled .

So perhaps one should guard against overanalysing "the abstract nouns of politics - populism, globalism and elitism".

That, at any rate, is the interesting view of Financial Times writer Janan Ganesh. In a column this week he suggests "the lesson lies in the man himself".

Instead of losing ourselves by overanalysing trends, he suggests that "the most important variable in politics, the ultimate determinant of electoral outcomes, is the individual quality of the candidate".

block_quotes_start A Ramaphosa victory in the upcoming ANC contest should be feared by any member of the extended Zuma family and any leader of an opposition party block_quotes_end

Unless the age is one of extremes, Ganesh posits that "there is no ideological zeitgeist too strong for a good politician to buck".

This brings us to another, more local, political event, which also occurred last Sunday - the long-awaited coming-out party of the man who would be the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa.

Given the arcane, essentially false, protocols of the ANC, every wannabe presidential candidate has to campaign for the top job without declaring to be doing so.

Hence, every occasion, from funeral services to memorial lectures, becomes an electoral hustings by another name.

Of course, there is nothing remotely politically innocent about Ramaphosa. As has been widely commented, his Chris Hani memorial address last week was not only a no-holds-barred personal declaration of intent, it was, more interestingly, an unblushing analysis of everything that has gone wrong with the ANC and its project of transforming South Africa.

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He attacked the culture of pervasive personal greed, patronage, gatekeeping, vote-buying and disunity. He explicitly stated that continuing down this path was the scree slope to electoral loss and unmooring the ANC from its principles and essential purpose.

Careful to claim that the late Hani disparaged such tendencies, he implicitly declared that no living person associated with "private individuals who exercise undue influence over state appointments and procurement decisions" could rescue either party or country from the current road to drift.

Score that against Jacob Zuma, his former wife and Saxonwold's most infamous residents.

Using Ganesh's recent analysis on the power of individual leadership overcoming that Marxist idea of the "motive forces of history", improving on the baleful legacy and poor leadership of Zuma might not be a big ask.

One cynic suggested recently that "any one of 20 names plucked at random from the Johannesburg telephone directory would make a better president than Jacob Zuma".

Ramaphosa was front of mind for me recently as I was preparing for a lecture overseas on South Africa's democratic transition, delivered on Freedom Day on Thursday.

Although he is shy about claiming his crowning achievement - the constitution itself - anyone who participated in that "rollercoaster revolution" will attest to Ramaphosa's pre-eminence in it.

Sadly, Ramaphosa's coyness on this document is not because of self-effacement, but precisely because the compromises essential to its successful achievement are seen by some today as a sellout to the forces of "white monopoly capital" et al.

Something else far more significant from those helter-skelter days of the early 1990s also sprang to mind.

In his speech last Sunday, Ramaphosa stated that the crisis in the ANC is its most significant since 1994.

But he would know this is not new territory.

When the ANC held its first conference in 33 years inside South Africa, in July 1991, the situation was - in the words of an able chronicler of those times, Patti Waldmeir - "desperate".

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Outgoing party secretary-general Alfred Nzo was as forthright about the crisis back then as Ramaphosa is today.

Nzo told his party: "We lack enterprise, creativity, and initiative." Tellingly, he added: "We appear very happy to be pigeonholed within the confines of populist rhetoric and cliché."

And that was a full 26 years before the bogeymen of "white monopoly capital" and "radical economic transformation" entered the ANC lexicon.

In her book Anatomy of a Miracle, Waldmeir records: "The same [ANC] conference which bemoaned the ANC's malaise also took the first steps to cure it. The movement elected a dynamic new secretary-general, Cyril Ramaphosa, head of the National Union of Mineworkers, who had spent a decade honing his skills as a tough negotiator ... His brand of tough pragmatism was perfect for the task ahead: putting the ANC on the offensive."

Two-and-a-half decades later, like an old prizefighter returning to the ring, the questions remain for Ramaphosa to answer: can he do it? Will he win? Or, as the French will soon ask of their new president, will the change be just more of the same?

A Ramaphosa victory in the upcoming ANC contest should be feared by two very different groups: any member of the extended Zuma family and any leader of an opposition party.

Both groupings will face a tough future if Ramaphosa becomes ANC president in December.

• Leon is a former leader of the DA and former South African ambassador to Argentina