From Bismarck to Blair, the art of political triangulation has delivered landslide victories – but as Cyril Ramaphosa’s hollow pivot on immigration shows, co-opting the politics of others is no substitute for the courage to change your own, writes Tony Leon.
If you want to get current politics down to a T here and everywhere, just examine the application of two words: triangulate and tergiversate.
Triangulation occurs when a politician positions himself between two extremes. An exemplar was Germany’s “Iron Chancellor”, Otto Von Bismarck. In the late 19th century, he co-opted then-radical policies to cement his conservative hegemony. He was the first European leader to introduce the modern welfare state.
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Third-way politics 
Far more recently, both former US president Bill Clinton and former UK prime minister Tony Blair were famous “triangulators”, practitioners of what they branded “third-way” politics.
Clinton, after a shattering loss of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, pivoted to demolish old habits of the left-leaning “tax and spend” brigade of his Democratic Party. He went on to radically reform and reduce federal welfare, toughen crime laws, and balance the federal budget. But he retained Democratic commitments to education and the environment.
Blair, at the same time, triangulated between the Labour Party’s commitment to social justice and an embrace of Margaret Thatcher’s approach to free market capitalism. He abolished old Labour’s commitment to state ownership of industry but simultaneously introduced a universal minimum wage. He maintained but reformed the regulatory state, reducing its impact with what he termed a “light touch”.
A class of their own
Traditionalists viewed both as unprincipled opportunists; they defended themselves as new-age adapters, not hidebound ideologues. In any event, both won smashing re-election victories (or in Blair’s case, three of them) of the sort that their current successors only dream about. Both made mistakes, from under-risking nationalism and overhyping globalisation, but both presided over high-level economic growth and near full employment.
It also helped that Blair and Clinton were excellent spontaneous communicators – and by the dismal standards of today, in a class of their own.
On local TV screens last Sunday, President Cyril Ramaphosa emerged to try his own brand of triangulation on the vexed issue, now threatening governments everywhere, of illegal immigration.
Blair, Clinton, and other expert triangulators succeeded by frankly acknowledging that the old ways had to change and presented themselves as change agents.
Ramaphosa, a fluent communicator, by contrast, is determined not to change a single pillar of party orthodoxy. Such technocratic reforms, as he countenances, need to be shoehorned into the outer limits permitted by ANC prescripts.
Even potential electoral oblivion hardly moves the party needle. He heads a state with more than 40% unemployment, where economic growth has been outstripped by population growth for 12 consecutive years.
Thus,  his familiar lament on Sunday on “persistently high levels of unemployment” and “too many communities experiencing poverty and inadequate access to opportunities”. He posed more as a bystander-victim of imposed circumstances beyond his reach, not a national leader determined to change the status quo.
He did not grasp the moment to change course. Rather, he presented the history of the past three decades and the policies that led SA to this point in self-absolving terms.
Where he did pivot, though, was on the issues of immigration – forced by deep forces now unleashed to offer a sort of two-handed solution. It also provides another handy alibi for the economic failures and poverty Ramaphosa highlighted in his speech.
Writing on News24, Rebecca Walker and Loren Landau of Wits University and Sharon Ekambaram of Lawyers for Human Rights noted: “Ramaphosa condemned xenophobic violence and vigilantism from one side of his mouth…From the other, he legitimised the anger of those who want immigrants gone. Sunday’s address reprised the same structure: condemn the violence, validate the grievance.”
But, as they noted:
“Blaming migrants does not fix water pipes, reopen clinics, or create jobs. People know this.”
Ramaphosa is hardly alone among democratic leaders in finding immigration electoral kryptonite. Even Blair’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer, pressured by Nigel Farage and the right on the issue, lamented that the Brits faced living in “an island of strangers”.
However, all Ramaphosa’s fixes announced on Sunday require a state capacity and efficiency that has been incapacitated and broken by the very policies and practices the president has been so slow to address or change. So, translating presidential rhetoric to practical achievement is likely to yield modest results at best.
Ramaphosa’s recent joining of the anti-immigrant chorus is a departure from the ubuntu Pan-Africanism he previously championed. Needs must, as they say. Even at risk of being called an apostate by no less a populist than Julius Malema, who had parked his incendiary anti-white rhetoric to speak up, alone almost, for the continental solidarity once part and parcel of ANC speak.
But what happens not when you change policy or direction but abandon your political home entirely?
“Tergum” is the Latin word for “back”, and to turn your back and abandon your cause is to tergiversate. In SA, it has a long and not a great reputation, and we term it “floor crossing”.
Floor-crossing 
Of course, perhaps the most famous floor crosser of them all was Winston Churchill. Elected a Conservative MP, he crossed the floor and attained high office by joining the Liberals and then returned to the Tories. He famously wrote: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”
Locally, a young politician, Liam Jacobs, recently did a ”rat” and even if far removed from Churchill, his decision to desert the Patriotic Alliance (PA) to return to the Democratic Alliance that he had left just a year before, got plenty of attention, even if most of it was negative.
Ebrahim Fakir, an analyst, was splenetic: “Liam Jacobs’ latest party-hop isn’t just spineless, it’s proof that for many, politics is purely opportunistic transactionalism. No ideology. No beliefs. No values. No fidelity. No shame.”
Fakir suggests this is bad news for the DA and its brand. And for the entire political class. Perhaps. Though the good news for the party is that opportunists generally go where opportunities are.
When I was at the party helm and bitterly resented “crosstitutes” (as the late Mangosuthu Buthelezi branded floor crossers) who left the DA and then welcomed new arrivals proceeding in the other direction into our ranks, I rationalised the joiners on the basis that political parties are about addition and not division.
Some floor-crossers abandon their political homes on principle. Others are simply of the “ek soek werk” sort; a few – who have a real constituency – send a signal to voters that the party they are joining is an expanding home for their followers. Others perform some strategic service (Jacobs, for example, rose to office on the back of 500 000 TikTok followers on social media).
The leader’s job 
Successful political parties need to be broad churches, not narrow sects, only admitting true believers.
But converts need to subscribe to the true religion of the movement they’ve joined. That is the binding glue that holds things and people together.
And the leader’s task is to provide it – sketch the vision and fill in the details.
“The ideology, the beliefs, the values, the fidelity“ that Fakir found absent in the new DA convert needs to be provided by the party leader.
And the followers, for whatever reason they’ve joined the new chorus, need to know the tune and the words of the hymn.