Next week’s local government election is a historic one and the most significant since the founding democratic election of 1994. But it will not be a watershed.
Historic because it is the first election at which two parties, rather than just one, can lay out a governmental record. And because there are two such records the electorate will be in a position to compare and contrast performance when making their electoral choices.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) had held office in the Western Cape before the last local government election in 2006, but only in coalition and for a relatively short period of time. Now it has had a decent run in power — in coalition government in the City of Cape Town since 2006 and, after its outright victory in the provincial election in 2009, also in the Western Cape government.
So the DA has a track record that can be scrutinised. Given the on-going confusion within the ANC in the region, there is absolutely no reason to think that the DA will do anything other than consolidate its support in Cape Town and win control of the city council with a clear majority this time — notwithstanding the ANC’s choice for mayoral candidate, the admirable Tony Ehrenreich, a man with a long record of service to the working class in the city.
That is because the DA has an equally strong candidate in Patricia de Lille. For years as fierce a critic of its conservatism as it was possible to find, she has taken the Independent Democrats to the DA and it is strange to see the campaign pictures of her wearing its blue t-shirt.
De Lille looks good but she also looks guilty. The habitual twinkle in her eye is now accompanied by a plaintive “well, can you really blame me?” look. It is not so much a case of her succumbing to the “if you can’t beat them join them” syndrome as to the fatigue of small-party political leadership, which is the task of Sisyphus: funding, quality candidates, decent colleagues and capable political organisational skills are all hard to come by.
It grinds you down. If you do okay you end up with perhaps 3% of the popular vote; the ANC continues to tower over you. For every step forward there are two steps back.
The DA is on the verge of escaping this vortex of despair. Partly this is because of resources — and the considerable cash that it is able to raise compared with the other opposition parties, enabling it to buy the organisational capacity necessary to compete with the ANC — and partly because of leadership.
Low electoral ceiling
Although his closest acolytes will deny this to the bitter end, the obnoxious hubris and arrogance of Tony Leon was repellent to most ordinary voters. With Leon at the helm, the DA’s head was always going to butt against a low electoral ceiling. His leadership was also unhelpfully dominant; the DA was a unicentric, one-trick-pony boys’ club. Now its leadership appears to be diversifying, in terms of politics and gender as well as race.
De Lille is an example of this. Although she has always vociferously rejected what she calls “isms”, her appealingly straightforward attitude to questions of political economy are, in ideological terms, essentially those of a social democrat. In the first democratic Parliament in the 1990s she was one of the most diligent and energetic MPs, always asking the simplest but most important question: “How will this improve the lives of the poor?”
This is relevant because as mayor she will have to do what the DA has yet to prove it is capable of doing: serving three constituencies at once — the working-class African, the large working-class coloured and the minority middle-class communities, which have been the DA’s core in the Western Cape and Cape Town.
It is the pivotal question that will be asked of the DA everywhere from now on. Cape Town and the Western Cape represents a platform for electoral growth for the DA only if it can muster convincing evidence to demonstrate that it has served more than a narrow middle-class constituency. Without such evidence, the DA is unlikely to be a persuasive alternative beyond the peculiar demographics and embedded historical loyalties and divides of the Western Cape.
This election will thus first and foremost be a test of whether the DA can build pockets of serious support, and even government, in towns and cities throughout the length and breadth of South Africa.
Their electoral slogan is now a claim to “deliver for all”. It is undoubtedly a strong slogan — and mischievous expropriation of the ANC’s core campaign slogan in 1994, “A better life for all” — that strikes the best balance between ambition and inclusiveness that the party has yet achieved, while also attacking the ANC’s weakness on public service delivery. But it also contains within it the DA’s greatest vulnerability: can it prove that it delivers for all? Does the DA actually deliver for all?
The question of the future of the other opposition parties is almost not worth asking. Although the Freedom Front may cling doggedly to its tiny little group of loyalists, spread thinly across the nation, the Congress of the People and the Inkatha Freedom Party are likely to continue their contrasting, yet no less inexorable, decline.
A consolidated opposition is well on the way and a two-horse race the inevitable outcome. Hence it is clear that next week is merely a staging post, though no less important for that fact; the watershed election will be the national election of 2019.
That is the date by when the titanic battles for power within the ANC — not between individuals (Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma) but between political “tendencies” (nationalist-popularist and social democrat) — will have reached a climax.
It is also the time when a majority of voters will be people to whom the “struggle dividend” is meaningless; the ANC’s legacy brand will have dwindled substantially. Why else do you think Julius Malema is making such a fuss about a struggle song?
And it is the time when the DA will aspire to winning 40% of the national vote. Once the ANC’s share falls beneath 60%, a majority is no longer certain and defeat becomes a distinct possibility. Much will then depend on how the ANC reacts to real electoral competition — will its performance sharpen with the competition or will it recoil and cling to power repressively?
Virtually anything is possible given the increasing instability of the ANC’s internal politics. But let us not get ahead of ourselves; 2019 is some way ahead. Next week is primarily about whether Helen Zille’s project remains on track.
There are plausibly different ways of measuring whether it does: winning 10% of black votes in a Cape Town township ward; winning working-class wards anywhere but Cape Town; achieving a plurality in significant towns or even cities in the north; competing (in other words, getting more than 35% of the vote) in a metro other than Cape Town; acquiring middle-class black votes in yuppie districts in Johannesburg. But for simplicity’s sake, winning 20% of the national vote next Wednesday would be as good a gauge as any.
Richard Calland is associate professor in the public law department of the University of Cape Town
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