Howard Barrell
The African National Congress and the smaller opposition parties expect voter support for the New National Party to collapse in coming weeks as high-profile defections by NNP leaders continue.
Some rival party strategists are now suggesting that, on June 2, the NNP may get only a quarter of the votes it achieved in 1994 – rather than the half indicated by the latest opinion poll evidence.
These strategists say they expect many former NNP supporters to stay away from the polls, rather than vote for other parties. The only clear exception to this likely trend at this early stage in the campaign is provided by the case of the Democratic Party. Polling evidence suggests the DP has won over a modest but significant proportion of former NNP voters, and that this trend has accelerated over the past four months in the Western Cape.
If former NNP voters do stay away from the polls in large numbers on June 2 this will increase the proportion of votes and seats won by other parties, although less dramatically than if former NNP supporters actually voted for other parties.
In the next fortnight, the ANC is expected to change the main thrust of its campaign against the NNP from attempting to destroy its leadership and organisational capacity through defections to persuading its former supporters on the ground to vote for the ruling party. The campaign will focus on coloured voters in the Western Cape, the NNP’s stronghold since 1994.
Rival party strategists base their predictions – that long-term decline in support for the NNP is on the brink of becoming a collapse – on their own polling and on-the-ground canvassing.
Some political observers warn, however, that predictions of a collapse in the NNP vote could be premature. In 1994, the ANC was convinced it would win the Western Cape from the National Party, but failed to come even close to doing so. A leading DP strategist was similarly cautious. An old “homing instinct” among voters might drive some back to the NNP as the election approached, he said
At the 1994 election, the NP won just more than 20% of all votes cast and an estimated 65% of the white vote.
The sharpest decline in the NNP’s support since then has occurred among white voters, but rival parties say they detect growing confusion and disillusion with it among its crucial coloured support base in the Western Cape as well.
The DP, which won only about 10% of the white vote nationwide in 1994, is now beckoning to become the largest single home for white voters. It is also trying to broaden its appeal beyond the upper middle classes in the black, coloured and Indian communities.
ANC sources say more high-profile NNP defections to their party are due in coming weeks, right up to the deadline on May 4 when all parties must provide their final candidate lists to the Independent Electoral Commission.
The ANC hopes to drain NNP energy and morale through this continual haemorrhage.
This week saw two further, damaging defections from the NNP to the ANC. Pierre- Jean Gerber, a former national youth leader of the NNP and a Western Cape provincial legislator, crossed over on Tuesday, while on Wednesday it was the turn of Mario Masher, an NNP MP in the National Assembly and a coloured politician in the Western Cape.
The NNP leadership around Marthinus van Schalkwyk is now in perpetual crisis and appears to have neither the ability nor the will to act against senior members of the party who are holding discussions with the ANC and others about defecting and are making little effort to disguise their activities or intentions.
Pieter Marais, the most prominent remaining coloured leader in the NNP, who serves as an MEC in the Western Cape provincial government, is still expected to defect to the ANC in the course of the campaign and to take a number of others with him, among them Anwar Ismail, another member of the province’s legislature.
Marais left South Africa on an overseas trip on Wednesday evening, amid speculation that he would take the opportunity to hold talks with Cheryl Carolus, the ANC and South African Communist Party leader from Cape Town who now serves as South Africa’s high commissioner in London.