Both the Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress believe they can benefit from the demise of the New National Party, but the electoral impact may be barely tangible — particularly for the opposition.
The NNP decided last weekend to dissolve itself as soon as the results of local government elections are certified. Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk exhorted supporters to lend their allegiance to the ANC.
Electoral support for the NNP has been eroding rapidly since the mid-1990s. In last year’s national election it got just 1,65% of the vote, down from more than 20% in 1994.
The NNP won so few votes that its dissolution was politically irrelevant in the short term, said Jonathan Faull, Political Researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa political information and monitoring service.
Faull reckoned there were both liberal and conservative elements among the 257 824 supporters who endorsed the party last year, and that both the ANC and the DA might accrue small gains.
DA spokesperson Helen Zille, however, said her party had already swept up substantial NNP support, and would continue to do so as voters realised that “the Democratic Alliance is the only viable opposition to the ANC”.
While conceding that some NNP support in the hotly contested Western Cape might have gone to the Independent Democrats, she was adamant that alliance with the ANC held no appeal for NNP supporters.
Faull, however, said the defining characteristic of the NNP’s collapse was that the three million votes it had lost since 1994 were not matched by a swing to the Democratic Party or the DA. “It appears that the NNPs consistent flip-flopping in political and policy positions, and its concurrent decimation, has informed rising levels of voter apathy among a significant minority of opposition voters.”
The ANC is playing down the electoral calculus, instead stressing the value of the merger for national reconciliation. Party spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said former NNP leaders would play a prominent role in local government elections as the ruling party tried to broaden its appeal in largely white suburbs. Faull suggested, however, that the ANC was likely to benefit from the NNP’s demise.
Additional reporting by Nawaal Deane