If the first duty of an opposition party
is to oppose, or at least test, government policy at every turn, its second is presumably to try to become the ruling party.
The problem in South Africa is that none of the opposition parties appears to have even a chance of becoming the government in this election, or even the next. It is a problem most of the significant actors in the opposition acknowledge – from the New National Party to the Democratic Party, from the Freedom Front to the United Democratic Movement and the Federal Alliance. Some less fanciful members of the Pan Africanist Congress say so, too.
Opposition figures go on to predict that, after the election, there will have to be a realignment in their ranks if they are to produce a united opposition or an alliance capable of growing to the point where it can contend for state power.
So, while the primary result of the election, now likely in May, will be to confirm the African National Congress as South Africa’s government, a second may well be to lay the basis for an opposition realignment.
The support each opposition party gets at the polls will go some way towards sorting out a pecking order among them. But who gets the most seats is unlikely to be the most important influence on negotiations between them. The more decisive factors may well be which of them can demonstrate rising voter appeal and ideas distinguishable from the ANC’s. If so, the NNP, currently the biggest opposition party, is unlikely to call the shots in opposition discussions about unity.
The NNP may yet emerge as the largest opposition party after the election – though its rate of fragmentation and the poor state of its electoral organisation, particularly in its supposed Western Cape stronghold, may put paid to its hopes of doing so. But there is little prospect it will demonstrate increasing voter appeal. Moreover, it does not seem to have sorted out its ideas which, in one very important respect, are very close to the ANC’s.
Although the NNP has been mouthing Thatcherite variants of economic liberalism for years now, its conversion has been less than convincing. Relatively few of its leaders, for example, appear seriously persuaded that the best way to eradicate poverty or to create wealth is to emphasise the primacy of the individual, opportunity and enterprise.
Instead, there are many in the NNP who have great sympathy with the ANC’s use of the machinery of government to uplift an ethnically defined section of the population, in this case the black majority. Decades ago the old National Party used the same method to uplift the most important segment of its constituency: poor, mainly Afrikaner, whites.
Indeed, strip away the racist anti-black rhetoric some NNP politicians used to appeal to coloured voters in the Western Cape in the 1994 election, and what is left is a promise to use the machinery of provincial government to uplift the coloured community.
Those are the politics of Peter Marais and Patrick McKenzie, two of the most powerful Nats in the province. We know that Marais and McKenzie have been flirting with the ANC recently. Who was not even a little embarrassed by their heavy breathing? What is less well known is that top-ranking leaders of the NNP have sympathy with most ANC policy. Some of them, quite credibly, even consider themselves economically more interventionist – in fact, economically to the left – of the ANC. They and the ANC might have disagreed in the past about who should benefit from state intervention, but there is little disagreement on state intervention as such.
Nats who think this way say they are waiting for the ANC to break with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)before showing the ANC a flash of ankle. ANC rightwingers may see the Inkatha Freedom Party as first choice after such a break- up, but leading figures in the NNP want to be sure to position themselves as the ANC’s second choice, at least.
There is, of course, also a baser motivation for this kind of thinking among Nats. Opposition does not suit them, and some of them cannot see why it should. Few are practised at or well equipped for its long haul.
This has been a long way round to saying that I don’t think the NNP will be able to lead an opposition in the process of realignment. The NNP lacks the distinctive body of ideas and the guts to get on even terms with the ANC in, say, six or even 16 years’ time.
More likely we will see the DP take the lead – unless, that is, it manages to cock up its election campaign spectacularly between now and polling day. The DP looks set to show the sharpest growth of all parties in the election, which would make it the party with momentum. It has also been developing a body of ideas in recent months which represents a comprehensive, if not entirely convincing, alternative to ANC policies.
Over the past year, the DP has launched three major discussion documents: The Death of the Rainbow Nation, The Corruption of Transformation and Building the Opportunity Society. The gist of their attack is that the ANC has got it wrong by reintroducing race policies and racial quotas as the way to transform South African society and rid it of past inequalities and injustices.
The DP argues the ANC has made the mistake of imagining that the greater the proportion of black faces in an institution, the more it has been transformed. Far from achieving the ANC’s declared objectives, the DP suggests these policies have placed the country on a path to economic underperformance, poor service delivery to those who most need it, enrichment of sectors of black society which least need it, demoralisation of sectors of the youth, and towards ”increased racial tension, hostility and, possibly, conflict”.
The DP maintains this quick-fix approach will lead to the unravelling of the government’s plans and voter disillusionment with the ANC. It suggests that a better way to redress past inequalities and ensure sustainable growth is to target policy at individuals, not racial groups, and to expand and equalise access to opportunities for all. And it has come up with proposals on this approach which could apply to land redistribution, education and other aspects of social provision.
If the DP does, indeed, end up setting the agenda in a realignment of the opposition, South African political debate is likely to become a far clearer competition between liberalism and the soft-left populism of the ANC.
With aggressive figures at the forefront like Tony Leon and Joe Seremane, that contest could quickly become a far closer one than is the case now. And when the ANC alliance eventually splits – assuming communists and socialists ever develop the stomach for the step – South Africa will take a leap towards normality.