SACP courts ANC, MK and EFF for left summit

The SACP has invited the ANC, MK and EFF, which together secured 64.28% of the national vote, to attend its summit aimed at rebuilding co-ordinated working-class politics before the 2026 local government elections.

The EFF has confirmed its participation, while the ANC and MK have only acknowledged receipt of the invitation.

The “Conference of the Left”, convened by a steering committee led by SACP general secretary Solly Mapaila, is scheduled to be held at end-May, six months before the municipal polls. It is expected to draw at least 300 delegates from trade unions, community formations, social movements and political organisations.

The conference comes amid deepening fractures in South Africa’s traditional left bloc. The ANC, which has governed since 1994, faces pressure from two parties founded by its own expelled former leaders, Julius Malema’s EFF and Jacob Zuma’s MK party, both of which drew significant support away from the ANC since their establishment in 2013 and 2023, respectively.

Political parties collectively are capped at 10% of the floor, with other organisations comprising the rest of the delegates. Azapo and the PAC, a member of the GNU with the ANC, are also expected to participate.

The gathering arrives against the backdrop of a big strategic shift by the SACP itself, with the party — which spent three decades operating as an insider force in the ANC-led alliance with Cosatu — planning to contest the municipal elections on its own on November 4.

“Capital holds the commanding heights. The left is fragmented. The moment is urgent,” a concept note of the gathering seen by Business Day states.

“They speak in the language of popular grievance but direct anger away from the structural sources of inequality and toward false enemies. Their advance is the political expression of unresolved social contradictions.”

Among other things, the conference is expected to develop a direction on how leftist organisations should approach the upcoming elections.

“The moment is also shaped by the specific political terrain of the 2026 local government elections. Left forces must approach the electoral terrain not as an end in itself but as one front in a broader struggle for working-class and popular power.

“The conference will not determine electoral strategy, but the organisational capacity it builds will inform how left formations engage the 2026 elections and the period beyond them,” the document reads.

The conference also seeks the establishment of a Council of the Left, described in the document’s co-ordination platform, to facilitate joint campaigns, shared political education and collective intervention.

“It is not a command structure. It does not issue directives to member organisations. It does not replace existing formations or override their political autonomy…. Organisations join it with their full identity intact and co-ordinate where interests and priorities converge,” it says.

The proposed guest list has angered some organisers, with Mametlwe Sebei of the Workers and Socialist Party saying it will not be a true representation of the left.

“It’s the conception of the entire conference that we take issue with. To characterise it as a conference of the left when openly capitalist parties like the ANC and MK, as well as a chamber of commerce, among others, are going to be part of it, is wrong at the most basic political level,” he said.

“The meeting itself also made it clear to us that the SACP has decisively broken from the ANC and the politics that led to that alliance with the butchers of the working class.

“The Real Conference of the Left will entail a broadest unity but the unity of the working class, its struggles in all its main theatres — workplaces, communities and campuses — and for a genuine socialist alternative,” Sebei said.