Howard Barrell
The new opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), is likely to win at least one out of every five town council seats in the forthcoming local government elections. It has a realistic chance of taking control of Cape Town and, if the African National Congress has difficulty in getting its vote to the polls, an outside chance of seizing Johannesburg.
An early examination of voting patterns of the DA’s two main constituents, the Democratic and New National parties, indicates the DA will win at least 1E485 of the wards and proportional representation seats in the local government elections in towns and cities around the country. This figure excludes seats on district councils.
The DA looks certain to win control of Middelburg, Graaff-Reinet in the Karoo, Humansdorp on the coast, Upington near the Namibian border, Mafikeng (in conjunction with Lucas Mangope’s United Christian Democratic Party), and a variety of other towns in the Eastern, Northern and Western Cape.
The DA’s share of town and city councillors could be as high as one in four, according to voting patterns and trends.
Where the DA does not provide the government of a town or city after the forthcoming elections, it is highly likely to be the official opposition to the ANC or Inkatha Freedom Party.
Beyond the local government elections, the new party’s road from opposition to being a serious proposition in South African politics is likely to be long and hard.
Key movers in the new party said this week they were working to a long time frame. They seem unlikely to be able mount a critical challenge to the ANC for the next nine to 14 years.
The DA’s immediate objective is to consolidate the opposition vote. This involves bringing other parties into the alliance if possible, notably Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement, halting the decline in the total vote for opposition parties evident since 1994 and, over the next year or two, reversing this decline in the run-up to the next general election in 2004.
Achieving this turnaround is likely to depend on the DA’s ability to hold on to its support among the coloured population and, particularly, to start winning meaningful support among African voters. Leon has said repeatedly in recent days that this is the great challenge before the DA.
The DA’s aim over the next four years appears to be to win over about 5% of ANC voters, who currently make up 66% of all voters.
Further down the road, the DA plans to bring the ANC’s share below 50% of the total, and then to move to displace it as the government.
The formation of the alliance between the DP and NNP, combined with undertakings of cooperation from Louis Luyt’s Federal Alliance and Lucas Mangope’s UCDP, gives its leader, Tony Leon, 71 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly.
The ANC has 266 seats, its coalition partner the IFP 34, the UDM 14, the African Christian Democratic Party six, and the remaining nine seats are shared by the tiny parties.
Both Leon and his deputy in the DA, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, leader of the NNP, expressed some concern this week that they might lose some supporters who felt they could not back the new party. But both felt the losses would be only at the margins.
DP research since the formation of the DA at the weekend shows 88,3% of DP supporters and 86,4% of NNP supporters support unity in the new party.
Robin Carlisle, a former DP MP, expressed the hopes of the bulk of his party’s leadership when he said at the DP federal council which approved the formation of the new party at the weekend that the formation of the DA meant his old party was moving from “principled irrelevance” to “principled relevance”.