The applause from right-wing South African quarters for the US’s illegal action in Venezuela reveals a politics increasingly comfortable with the idea that force, not law, is the proper instrument of change, provided it is wielded against ideological enemies. Corné Mulder, leader of the Freedom Front Plus,did not distance himself from this authoritarian spectacle. On the contrary, he publicly welcomed the “toppling” of Venezuela’s government, framing the episode as a triumph over socialism.
In doing so, he endorsed not merely an outcome, but a method. And the method was lawlessness. Let us be clear about what occurred.
The forcible capture of a sitting foreign head of state by the US was not law enforcement, humanitarian intervention or moral rescue. It was a violation of international law, plain and unadorned. There was no claim of self-defence under article 51 of the United Nations Charter.
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There is no recognised doctrine in international law that permits one state to abduct the leader of another because it disapproves of his governance. It aggravates it. Power does not launder illegality.
It exposes it. Nor does the episode survive scrutiny under American constitutional law. The US Constitution fragments war powers precisely to prevent unilateral executive adventurism.
Congress, not the president, is vested with the authority to declare war. The seizure of a foreign leader abroad is the very sort of executive overreach the framers sought to restrain. When legality is discarded both internationally and domestically, what is being displayed is not resolve, but institutional corrosion.
Against this backdrop, the applause from right-wing South African quarters is not merely tasteless. It is revealing. It reveals a politics increasingly comfortable with the idea that force, not law, is the proper instrument of change, provided it is wielded against ideological enemies.
Today it is Caracas. Tomorrow it is Pretoria. What deepens the irony is the moral posture from which this applause is usually delivered.
South African right-wing politics, including the Freedom Front Plus, routinely presents itself as a crusade against corruption, misgovernance and state malfeasance. Yet when the moment comes to signal virtue, it is not to constitutional restraint or clean governance that some now look to, but to the most corrupt president in US history. Donald Trump is not a symbol of legality restored.
He is a monument to institutional decay: impeached twice, indicted repeatedly and habitually contemptuous of constitutional limits. To denounce corruption at home while seeking deliverance from a foreign leader whose career has been a masterclass in self-dealing, obstruction and disdain for the rule of law is not principle. It is farce.
One cannot credibly defend constitutional order while genuflecting before a man who treats the law as a nuisance and the presidency as a personal instrument. To allow this posture to pass without consequence would itself be a dereliction, which is why President Cyril Ramaphosa should make it clear that the Freedom Front Plus has no place in a Government of National Unity unless its leader, Mulder, issues an unambiguous public apology to the nation for endorsing lawless authoritarian conduct. Mulder’s celebration matters because it normalises the unthinkable.
One need not harbour illusions about Venezuela to grasp the principle at stake. If states may kidnap leaders they dislike, then international law collapses into a catalogue of preferences. Sovereignty becomes conditional.
Law becomes decorative. And smaller states like South Africa learn, to their peril, that rules apply only until power intervenes.
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