In the opening salvo of the battle for the Western Cape coloured vote, Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon urged Mitchells Plain residents to reject the ”racial discrimination” and ”twisted perversion of affirmative action” of the African National Congress and vote to return the province to the DA.
Cape Flats residents cheered and applauded these words — reiterating the often heard ”We [coloureds] were not white enough before, and are not black enough now.”
The coloured vote is crucial to winning the Western Cape in the 2004 election. An estimated 53% of the population in the province is coloured, 23% African and 22% white.
Until a few years ago it was a given that areas like Mitchells Plain and dorpies like Swellendam would vote for the New National Party. A mixture of populist appeal and ”swart gevaar” rhetoric proved a vote-catching mix.
But, since the NNP walked out of the DA in favour of a cooperative governance arrangement with the African National Congress, the NNP has battled to re-establish its branches. It was defeated in the handful of by-elections it fought in traditional heartlands like Grassy Park on the Cape Flats and Malmesbury.
Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) researcher Lorato Banda said that although coloured communities had traditionally voted for the NNP, it was no longer that simple.
One factor was that people who had garnered votes for the NNP, like the former premiers of the province Peter Marais and Gerald Morkel, were no longer in office.
Also, the ANC has made significant inroads in the coloured working class vote. Anti-ANC rhetoric could backfire, particularly in circles that would interrogate issues in more detail, Banda added.
If Tuesday’s DA voter registration launch, under the motto ”You can make things change”, is anything to go by, it will maintain a strong anti-ANC line while deriding NNP leader and Premier Marthinus van Schalkwyk as ”an ANC mascot”.
And Leon was not shy to play the race card, a tactic for which he has, in the past, criticised the ANC and President Thabo Mbeki.
”You, who are told you are second class, you are less than someone else, you are our concern,” Leon told the 1 000-strong crowd. ”You will be put where you belong — in the inner circle of South Africa.”
The event also showcased a well-greased election machinery of posters, buses for supporters and T-shirts reading ”Mitchells Plain is DA”.
A few days earlier Van Schalkwyk launched the NNP’s voter registration drive in another part of Mitchells Plain. Before a banner, ”Make your NNP vote count”, he told 300 people that under the cooperative governance pact a vote for the NNP meant a say in government decision-making.
That message is a key to the NNP strategy, together with painting the DA as ”right-wing” and ”conservative”.
Meanwhile, Marais — with his dose of Christian fundamentalism and populism — may pose a threat to the NNP’s conservative coloured voting base.
Booted from both the DA and NNP, he now leads the New Labour Party and recently described himself as ”the brown horse which may yet emerge the favourite”.
However, voter apathy — largely sparked by the defection of NNP and DA representatives in the provincial legislature to other parties last year — remains an unknown factor.
The defections most affected the Western Cape, where both the Cape Town unicity and provincial administration changed hands from the DA to the ANC-NNP pact.