How South Africa is viewing Trump vs. Biden (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
-
South Africans are painfully aware that their country generally does not loom large, if at all, in the awareness of most Americans, nor in the policies of their government.
-
But that doesn't mean they're not waiting with keen interest to see the outcome of Tuesday's race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
- ...9 more annotations...
-
During the apartheid years, the White minority governments aligned themselves with the Western nations and leveraged SA's militarily strategic position to maximize British and US support.
-
The government's views tend to be at odds with those of President Donald Trump's administration over Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the seemingly intractable issue of Palestinian statehood, of which Ramaphosa's government is a vocal supporter.
-
There was anger when he tagged all of Africa, along with Haiti, as "shithole" countries, causing an affronted South African administration to summon the US chargé d'affaires for a dressing down.
-
President Cyril Ramaphosa's government seized on the #BlackLivesMatter protests to lament George Floyd's "regrettable death" and condescendingly observed that the incident "[presented] the USA with an opportunity to address fundamental issues of human rights."
-
This support, articulated by President Ronald Reagan as "constructive engagement," alienated the oppressed Black majority and left a lingering bad taste with many in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which has been the ruling party since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
-
Privately, it has a preference for Biden, with a government analyst telling me that South Africa believes the Democratic candidate would return to the multilateralism that Trump has scorned and is expected to be less protectionist and isolationist when it comes to China.
-
South Africa is dependent on a strong economic relationship with the US. There are around 600 US firms here, with many making SA their springboard to the rest of Africa.
-
The US is South Africa's third-biggest export destination and the country benefits from the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and the country hopes to continue to benefit from the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, currently under review.
-
Trump's stance on Israel has also drawn strong but quiet support from some sectors of South Africa's shrinking Jewish community, which numbers barely more than 50,000, equivalent to only 0.1% of the country's population of 58 million.