The results of the 2009 elections have signalled a decline in the popularity of two smaller opposition parties that came into existence when their charismatic leaders broke away from their parties and formed new ones to wide acclaim.
Both Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement and Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats have lost support, while their bitter rival, the Democratic Alliance, has made significant gains. By late Thursday afternoon the ID was poised to take just more than 1% of the vote compared with the 1,8% it received in the 2004 elections.
When De Lille came away from the 2004 elections with more than a quarter of a million votes she had everything going for her and for the ID, the party she started by crossing the floor in 2003.
She was the first female leader of a political party and was held in high esteem for her relentless work on exposing corruption in the multibillion-rand arms deal. She also managed to build a name for herself that meant the new party did not carry much baggage from her previous political home, the Pan Africanist Congress, that could haunt her.
According to Wits University analyst Susan Booysen, De Lille neglected her core Western Cape constituency in favour of the big prize — to cut across racial barriers and play to a big national following.
“As politically incorrect as this might sound, she should have nurtured her core voters and then moved on,” Booysen said. Instead, she decided to play with the big boys, waging a national campaign that was very expensive but failed to yield significant results.
Western Cape voters historically switch allegiances and “like to be begged” by political parties. Voters in other provinces are more set in their voting patterns. De Lille therefore lost on two fronts: she alienated her core supporters and struggled to win over new ones in other parts of the country.
The decline of the UDM, on the other hand, has been gradual. The party started with 3.42% of the national vote in its first elections in 1999 and dropped to 2.28% in 2004. Its highest provincial vote in that election was 8.91% in Holomisa’s home province, the Eastern Cape.
As results of the 2009 elections trickled in on Thursday it was clear that the party was on its deathbed. The Eastern Cape vote was standing at 3.77% at noon and the national vote was just 1.19%.
The party’s manifesto says all the vote-catching things the public wants to hear — free public education from primary school to grade 12, the reinstatement of the Scorpions, improved health services and increased crime-fighting efforts. But the outspoken Holomisa has failed to use his personality to get more voters on his side.
The UDM is one of the parties that seems to wait for the ANC to make mistakes and then tries to capitalise on them, observes University of KwaZulu-Natal political scientist Zakhele Ndlovu.
But the strategy is not working for the UDM, Ndlovu says. Holomisa has become “a permanent commentator on the ANC and the alliance”.