Inkatha Freedom Party leaders are exploring the idea of a broad electoral pact involving itself the Democratic Alliance, the United Democratic Movement and the Pan Africanist Congress for next year’s general election.
The party’s national council will this weekend discuss the immediate task of consolidating its loose alliance with the DA.
A formal pact would consolidate the relationship between the parties, given new impetus by their joint move last week to dissolve the KwaZulu-Natal legislature and stymie a provincial floor-crossing law that would have delivered KwaZulu-Natal to the African National Congress.
Facing the dissolution of the legislature and a provincial election, the ANC backed down by agreeing to excise a retroactive clause that would have reinstated five legislature members who lost their seats when they defected prematurely.
A national council member said the IFP and the DA had held preliminary discussions on an electoral pact at their top-secret, two-day retreat last month, attended by IFP president Mangosuthu Buthelezi and DA leader Tony Leon.
The IFP member said: “There are other members who feel that the cooperation should be widened to include other political parties, such as the UDM and even the PAC.”
Another senior IFP member said that the national council meeting would focus on the 2004 election.
IFP national spokesperson Musa Zondi said the electoral pact with the DA would be one of the issues for discussion. The IFP had been preparing for elections since February last year.
In July last year the Mail & Guardian revealed the DA’s secret plan to prise the IFP loose from the ANC and form an electoral pact ahead of the 2004 election. DA national chairperson James Selfe then denied the existence of an electoral pact, but added that the DA “would do anything to reduce the hegemony of the ANC”. The DA’s KwaZulu-Natal leader, Roger Burrows, said last week it was pre-mature to talk of an electoral pact.
However, senior IFP members said the two parties would soon meet to thrash out the details of how a pact would work.
UDM leader Bantu Holomisa said his party had decided to go it alone in the 2004 election. He was, however, willing to talk to the IFP.
The PAC’s Thami ka Plaatjie said the party would “not rule out a pact with the IFP”.
“We have very positive relations with the IFP and have held informal discussions with their senior leaders,” he said.
The ANC in KwaZulu-Natal signalled this week it will focus on race in its efforts to disrupt the burgeoning IFP-DA relationship.
Speaking at ANC Youth League leader Vusi Mzimela’s funeral in Durban, ANC provincial leader S’bu Ndebele said the IFP “had thrown itself heart, body and soul into a disgraceful anti-ANC alliance with the party of white supremacy”.
Ndebele said in its relationship with the ANC, the IFP had had “the rare opportunity to cleanse itself of the stains of having, in the past, collaborated with apartheid in carrying out much of its dirty work, but it has chosen to abandon so quickly this path of honour in preference for an organisation that was living in cold isolation, abandoned by everyone, save for the most backward elements among white people and the most stupid among black people”.
The IFP’s Zondi hit back that the phrase “white supremacists” aptly described the New National Party, with which the ANC has a cooperation pact.