No sooner had I left my U.S. home and all its fractious politics that I ran into the same scenario thousands of miles away in my other home, South Africa. I came back to brutal opposition politics and a bubbling cauldron of dissent within the ruling party not unlike America’s Blue Dog Democrats.

In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress Party has always been a broad church, accommodating political stripes from the left, right and center. Tensions among them have always ebbed and flowed, sparked principally by the left—the Communist Party and the powerful labor unions. And in the current politics, tensions are flowing powerfully. The left elements are raising their voices, if not yet flexing their muscles, trying to steer the government into a more socialist agenda, pushing it to abandon the fiscally conservative, business-friendly, free-market approach of the previous government led by Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki’s government stimulated business opportunity and economic growth, along with major efforts to attract foreign direct investment. But massive poverty remains, giving ammo to its critics. The left was a key actor in the drama that unseated Thabo Mbeki and elevated Jacob Zuma to the country’s presidency. And to almost no one’s surprise, the chickens are coming home to roost.

The left is demanding more government spending and the scrapping of inflation targets that guide monetary policy. It’s vehemently arguing that it is entitled not only to be heard, but also to have its way as the main center of political power. And it has even gotten personal, with Julius Malema, the firebrand president of the ANC Youth League, calling Jeremy Cronin, the Communist Party’s deputy secretary general, a “white messiah,” for disagreeing with his call for nationalizing the mines and the manufacturing sector. Cronin responded by calling Malema “a racist.”

Oddly, they clashed over an issue of nationalization—which the left-wing supports, but selectively. The communists wants government control of SASOL, the biggest maker of motor fuel from coal, but it draws the line at nationalizing the mining and manufacturing industries—which make South Africa the largest economy on the continent, but which have suffered huge losses and laid off thousands as a result of the global financial crisis. Malema wants to nationalize those sectors for that reason. But the Communist Party accused him of wanting to further enrich the blacks who were brought into the sectors under the Mandela and Mbeki government policy of black economic empowerment.