‘It was a principled decision.” With this statement, a range of politicians crossed the floor to join or start new political homes.
Was it really principle that pushed them? Not in the popular mind. On radio talk shows and on the letters pages of newspapers, they are not floor-crossers, but double-crossers.
It’s likely the New National Party’s Sheila Camerer is leaving more because she has seen the writing on the wall as the party crumbles and less because it is no longer a federalist party — it stopped exercising this principle years ago. The same goes for those who crossed with her. On principle, they should have left long ago.
Most of the United Democratic Movement defectors are going because the party’s getting blacker as leader Bantu Holomisa’s lieutenants make their presence felt. Deputy president Gerhard Koornhof said he was leaving because the party’s rainbow dream had been deferred — has he not noticed the African National Congress has returned, under Thabo Mbeki, to its Africanist roots? Others, like Themba Sono, are going because they are allegedly being sidelined by a white clique in the Democratic Alliance. Internal party battle or principle?
A second look means we move away from the tallying of party losers and winners. The only question we must answer when the floor-crossing window period expires tonight is whether our democracy is stronger.
And the answer to that is an unfortunate “no”. Floor-crossing can only be at its democratic best when coupled with a constituency system. The present laws were sculpted to give legislative effect to the ANC’s pact with the NNP, not to enable representatives to make decisions on principle and in consultation with their constituencies. Indeed, the voters have been completely left out of the equation. When Cassie Aucamp, for example, swopped the Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging for the National Action, the choice of about 57 000 voters was nullified. The UDM defections betrayed about 40 000 voters.
Another aspect of floor-crossing demands a second look and that is the claim that it will lead to a fundamental reshaping of our body politic. Not so. “Opposition” in South Africa is a fight for the hearts and minds of white voters and for some regional pools, like the coloured bloc of the Western Cape, the Indian vote in KwaZulu-Natal or the Umtata metropole. There is little policy opposition in our electoral politics, bunched centre to left of centre. And as analyst Stephen Friedman points out, the ANC has not had a single defection, so there is no grassroots shift.
The seismic shift will only come about when there is a credible black alternative to the ANC, says analyst Adam Habib. And we are at least three elections away from that, if post-colonial Africa is anything to go by.