Читать книгу New South African Review 2 - Paul Hoffman - Страница 41

Neil Southern and Roger Southall

Political opposition parties in post-1994 South Africa have always had to confront the electoral dominance of the African National Congress (ANC), perpetually sustained as it is, not only by its firm grip on the state machinery but also by the historical memory it evokes among the majority black population as the party of liberation. Opposition parties have themselves come from a variety of political backgrounds – from alternative liberation traditions (such as the Pan-Africanist Congress and the Azanian People’s Organisation); from ethnic exclusivism (the Freedom Front and, many would say, the Inkatha Freedom Party); from non-nationalist ideological perspectives (the Democratic Alliance and the African Christian Democratic Party); and from splits from other parties (the United Democratic Movement). But apart from the daunting prospect of over-hauling the ANC, opposition parties have had to confront the continuous dangers of disagreement and disunity among themselves as they seek to share about a third of the total popular vote among the fifteen parties which have – at one election or another – gained representation in parliament. With fragmentation of the vote and a multiplicity of opposition parties and perspectives encouraged by the national list proportional representation electoral system, consolidation of the very diverse opposition vote has always been problematic, despite alliances formed at one time or another between various political parties. Nonetheless, the 2009 general election recorded three significant political developments – two of which, as we shall see, were to be confirmed by the results of the 2011 local government elections.

The first development was the further consolidation of the position of the Democratic Alliance (DA), which increased its share of the vote from the mere 1.73 per cent won by its predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP), in 1994 to 16.66 per cent in 2009; the second was confirmation of the eroding political base of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), from 10.54 per cent of the vote in 1994 to a miserable 4.55 per cent in 2009; and the third was the arrival of what many portrayed as a significant new player on the scene, the Congress of the People (Cope). Formed principally by followers of Thabo Mbeki, who had been defeated as party president by Jacob Zuma at the ANC’s Polokwane conference in December 2007 and ejected as state president in September 2008, its emergence from the body of the ruling party was widely presented as a significant threat to the ANC: it was nonracial, yet could simultaneously draw on the ANC liberation tradition and appeal to disaffected African voters. Although performing less well than it had hoped, Cope nonetheless polled a highly respectable 7.42 per cent of the vote after just a few months’ existence (Southall and Daniel, 2009).

Hopes were plentiful in opposition circles that Cope would provide for a new era, opening up the prospects for new alliances in opposition politics, as indicated by the appearance at its founding congress in December 2007 of Helen Zille, leader of the DA. Cope, it was argued, could break the logjam of South African politics, potentially providing for the formation of an opposition whose appeal would go beyond race and identity and provide for a more issue-oriented politics. Yet in the two years after the 2009 election events panned out very differently. Cope descended into infighting, and the IFP was embroiled in an internal leadership battle which speeded its decline into irrelevance. In contrast, the DA appears to be further consolidating its position as the undisputed party of opposition, having in 2010 absorbed the Independent Democrats (ID), a small party drawing largely on the coloured vote in the Western Cape, whose leader, Patricia de Lille, is renowned as a feisty and vigorous campaigner and who was to be elected in the 2011 local government elections as the DA’s candidate for mayor of Cape Town. These developments would argue for the moment that the South African political system is en route to a de facto two-party system – although, as we shall argue in our conclusion, the DA’s status as the principal party of opposition could well be challenged in the future if a new political force were to arise to its left, drawing upon disaffection with the ANC among social movements and trade unions.

There is little need to examine the damage which Cope and the IFP have inflicted upon themselves since the 2009 elections. It is sufficient to say that Cope has been riven by a conflict between its principal figures, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota which has led to disputes about leadership and funding, and a hugely embarrassing national conference which saw actual fighting between the principals’ supporters. Never before in opposition circles has such intra-party bitterness been generated about so little, with the result that many of those who originally saw in it a new beginning have fled from it, thoroughly disillusioned.

Meanwhile, the IFP has been torn by an internal battle between founder leader Mangosutho Buthelezi and Zanele Magwaza-Msibi, the party’s former national chair. As mayor of Zululand district, Magwaza-Msibi established a creditable record for delivery and efficiency, and had seemed the most likely figure to reverse the IFP’s decline in KwaZulu-Natal, where the party’s vote had collapsed to a mere 22.4 per cent in 2009 compared to 50.5 per cent in 1994. But Buthelezi, aged eighty-two, like many an African leader before him, has been constantly and humbly obedient to the demands of his subservient party heirarchy that he retain the leadership, while Magwaza-Msibi, drummed out of the party by his supporters, proceeded to form her own National Freedom Party. In short, the two parties which presented the major alternative vehicles of opposition in 2009 (securing thirty and eighteen seats in the national assembly respectively, compared to the DA’s sixty-seven) are in a state of seemingly irretrievable decline.

That the collapse of Cope and the IFP would offer a new opportunity for the DA to consolidate its position as the principal challenger to the ANC seems to have been confirmed by the results of the 2011 local government elections, in which the party’s vote climbed to nearly 24 per cent of the votes cast (in the 2006 local elections it had obtained only 14.7 per cent). In contrast, the third largest share of the vote was taken by the IFP with just 3.6 per cent, followed by the NFP with 2.4 per cent and Cope a miserly 2.1 per cent. The remarkable increase in the DA’s vote appears to be principally an outcome of the squeezing by the DA of its opposition rivals but, nonetheless, the party claimed in the wake of the contest to have increased its support among black Africans to five per cent from the one per cent it achieved in the 2009 general elections.

All this raises questions anew about whether the DA is proving able to overcome its image (as sustained by the ANC’s harping on its origins), as a party of reaction and racism, unwilling to take South Africa beyond the lingering racial contours of apartheid. This chapter therefore examines the background and prospects for the DA, addressing three themes in particular: first, why white (and particularly Afrikaner) voters have come to favour the DA; second, how the party is attempting to present itself as one which promotes a nonracial South African patriotism; and third, the DA’s understanding of political opposition and the obstacles which lie in the way of its making further electoral progress.