Viewed in a global context, SA’s election results in May were atypical; in fact, they went about as sharply against the grain as they possibly could. It is worth asking why.
Electorates around the world are, famously, bringing shocking people to power: the US, Brazil, Italy, Hungary. Elsewhere, in the UK, France and Germany, for instance, the fortunes of the far right are growing. Electorates are increasingly sceptical of the establishment and are shattering coalitions that had been stable for decades.
SA could not be more different. The story here, as Oxford University SA Rhodes scholar Saul Musker argued immediately after the election, is that the centre held. As Musker pointed out, 78% of the electorate voted either for the ANC or the DA, established parties with leaders who preach economic orthodoxy.
On the face of it, this is pretty surprising. So much about SA would suggest that it is primed for a populist insurgency. The majority of the population undoubtedly considers the current economic order to be unjust. Levels of inequality are not only intolerably high, they are also racially skewed, a perfect cocktail for populist mobilisation. The terms of the 1994 settlement are daily under attack. Almost everybody believes that the cardinal promises of liberation have been broken.
And there is no shortage of voices on the political stage reminding South Africans how much has gone wrong. The EFF is the embodiment of a single complaint: that after 25 years of political freedom black people remain economically in chains. And the Zuma-Magashule faction of the ANC talks daily of an unholy alliance between Cyril Ramaphosa and white monopoly capital.
Everyday life is positively filled with populist imagery. So why did the centre hold? The answer, I would suggest, is epoch-defining. For the first time in its history the SA electorate has voted against corruption. It is difficult to exaggerate how different this is to anything that has gone before. And we have Jacob Zuma to thank; he scared South Africans into voting not for what they hope, but against what they fear.
The most important evidence for this is in the seesawing fortunes of the ANC. Under Zuma, support for the governing party was in freefall. Counterfactuals are never certain, but it is probable that the ANC’s dismal showing in the 2016 local government elections — 53% of the electorate voted for it — was a midway point in a longer slide; in other words, if Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma had been president the ANC would most likely have garnered less than 50% of the vote.
The slide was stopped, and, indeed, partially reversed — a pretty extraordinary occurrence — in large part on the promise that the new man in charge was not out to rob the country blind.
The other evidence lies in the fortunes of the EFF. Many pundits read the election result as a triumph for Julius Malema. But it really was not. Given that much of the country agrees with his critique of the economic order and identifies with his complaint about racial injustice, the EFF’s 10% of the vote is pretty paltry, even if it is a vast improvement on last time. I would hazard a guess that many people did not vote for Malema not because of the content of what he says, but because he is not trusted. His proximity to the rot at the heart of the political establishment is just too nakedly visible. The cap on the EFF’s vote is thus also a signal that in 2019 the electorate’s choices were guided by the fear of corruption.
This is largely a depressing story. The centre held not because it is loved but because it is — this time at any rate — the least feared. Unprecedented numbers of eligible voters did not register, and unprecedented numbers of registered voters did not bother to go to the polls. Many of those who did take the trouble to vote cast their ballots in fear, not hope. They backed Ramaphosa because they believed he was clean; they rejected Malema because they feared he was corrupt.
People participated in the political process primarily to limit the damage politicians might do. That has never happened before. For 20 years South Africans voted their hopes. In a post-Zuma world they now vote their fears.
• Steinberg teaches African Studies at Oxford University.
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