Parties place a good deal of weight on the permanent presence of posters.
At first it seems like an advertisement for an estate agent. ‘Come Home!” the poster proclaims, above a photo of an apparently rather geniallooking man, who seems vaguely familiar. Then you realise, as you get closer, that you recognise him. It is in fact Peter Marais, the disgraced former New National Party/Democratic Alliance Western Cape premier and now leader of a newly — and hastily — formed New Labour Party.
There are two remarkable features to this apparition. The first is the absolutely bizarre design motif that appears on the poster and which is almost beyond powers of description.
A jagged, up-turned turret contraption encircles the lower half of Marais’s photo like a brace. If it weren’t so large, it might be that he is holding a set of false teeth. But it is bright red; has the devil dismounted his crown? Or is the turret feature intended to resonate with the ‘Come Home” theme? Barricades to be manned against the onslaught of all-comers perhaps.
The second notable thing is Marais’s determined disinclination to remain outside of public life despite the double scandal of the attempted street-naming deception — when he was mayor of Cape Town — and the Roodefontein development — when he was premier and for which he is currently being tried for corruption. Marais must think that the group of the electorate to whom he is extending the invitation to ‘Come Home!” — the coloured working class of the Western Cape — is unconcerned by such trivialities. Perhaps he is right; in the absence of any opinion polling data it is hard to tell. There are rumours among party campaigners and strategists that support for the NNP has collapsed amid what was in 1994 and, to an even greater extent, 1999, its core constituency. Privately, some NNP officials have been urging FW de Klerk to come out of retirement to lend a hand with a social group that held him in extraordinary high levels of affection.
I have never forgotten the final National Party rally of the 1994 campaign, when thousands of mostly coloured voters crammed into the Good Hope Centre and treated De Klerk to a rock-star reception.
Marthinus van Schalkwyk has never passed muster as a substitute and now has the fundamentally awkward task of selling cooperation
with the African National Congress to a market that was carefully — and ruthlessly — honed by his predecessor over many years to hate the ANC.
‘Let us be your voice”, a tie-less Van Schalkwyk appeals from the posters.
Or, along a different stretch of road ‘You deserve a fair share”. And elsewhere in this perpetual battle of the lamp-posts, ‘Your Key to Government”.
It is saying: because we are in partnership with the ANC, and are sharing power with them, even as a very junior partner, we give you more influence than, say, a vote for the DA. It is a perfectly reasonable political position; but a very hard one to sell, especially to this particular electoral market.
Predictably, the DA is adopting a stronger stance in its quest for the key, swing constituency of coloured working-class voters. ‘The NNP is with the ANC” it states, against a dramatic red background. This is a simple attack against the NNP rather than the ANC, in keeping with its general new strategy, which is far less negative than in previous elections.
This time the DA has gone for an uncomplicated, unflashy and uncontroversial main slogan. ‘South Africa Deserves Better” was found by focus groups to have the most resonance.
Instead of attacking the ANC directly, which is a very difficult strategy for Tony Leon to implement when appealing to black voters, a more subtle, indirect criticism — ‘They are doing OK, but you deserve better, don’t you?” — has a greater chance of success.
Generally, the sloganeering hardly captures the imagination. Aside from the ‘More Voice for your Vote” of Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats, only a curious obsession with the word ‘better” stands out.
Apart from the DA’s ‘South Africa Deserves Better”, the ANC proclaims it will ‘Do More, Better”, while the United Democratic Movement offers the linguistically challenging ‘Better Future Plan”.
Party strategists point out that posters are just one of five main methods of communicating with the electorate, to accompany
radio, direct canvassing, pamphlets and rallies. But they are certainly the most visible; and the parties place a good deal of weight on the importance of the permanent presence that the lamp-post war gives them.
The DA is printing more than half a million such posters, for example.
This takes up a substantial part of any election budget; smaller, less well-resourced parties struggle to compete with the bigger ones. Happily for them, there was news this week of a R6,5-million across-theboard injection of cash support to the political parties from the Standard Bank Group and Liberty Life.