The Politics of Coalition Formation and Democracy in Lesotho

Abstract

Political parties' coalitions/alliances are almost a permanent feature of pluralist democracies. Although relatively new to the African continent, for they emerged during the third wave of democratisation in the early 1990s in a bid to oust from power different forms of despotic regimes, coalitions are becoming entrenched in Africa's political systems as weapons through which the political elite fights political battles. Lesotho's experience of the phenomenon began in the run-up to the 17 February 2007 snap elections and they are, it seems, more likely to endure. Drawing examples from other countries, which have a longer history of coalitions than Lesotho, this paper contributes to the current debate on the value of this phenomenon and its implications for Lesotho's nascent democracy. Although not a product of a democratic process themselves, for they have been formed by the political elite with no input from their parties' membership, Lesotho's coalitions have been a positive factor to the country's formal democracy rather than its antithesis. They have helped maintain the pre-elections political status quo, hence beneficial to those forming them both within the opposition ranks and the ruling party. Coalition formation in Lesotho, I argue, has been caused, to a large measure, by the office-seeking motives of the political elites and the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system. Acknowledging that coalitions will become part of Lesotho's politics as is the case in other places as the paper will show, I conclude that Lesotho should establish ways and means of regulating them so that they work in ways that preserve rather than undermine the spirit of the hard-fought-for MMP system.