A new piece of research is out on who votes for the EFF, and it makes for interesting reading. The researcher is Martin Bekker at Wits University. His data is drawn from a set of telephonic interviews in the wake of the December 2021 local government elections.
Bekker’s first finding is that EFF voters are better educated than either ANC or DA voters. Nearly a quarter of those who reported voting for the EFF held a postmatric qualification, compared to 17% of DA supporters and 12% of ANC supporters. Conversely, the DA and the ANC rely more heavily on undereducated voters than the EFF does. About 37% of people who vote ANC have less than a matric education. For the DA the figure is 35%, and for the EFF 25%.
EFF voters are also more well-off than ANC voters: 13% of EFF supporters earn more than R10,000 a month, compared to just 7% of ANC supporters. (The DA takes the cake here, though — 28% of its voters earn more than R10,000 a month.)
What do these figures tell us? In a way, they are not surprising. Organised political discontent in SA has never come from the poorest. The 1976 uprisings were led by high school students at a time when only a fifth of Soweto’s teenagers attended school at all; the children on the streets were by definition the very cream of the township’s elite.
As for the uprisings of the 1980s, unemployed youth may have provided the force of sheer numbers but the backbone consisted of organised labour and the mainly professional people who staffed the United Democratic Front. And closer to the present, the insurrection Jacob Zuma led against Thabo Mbeki in 2007 primarily mobilised the provincial middle classes.
Discontent
The poor have never been in the forefront of radical politics in SA, and the EFF is no different. The discontent it draws upon is that of young, well-educated people; its ideas come from SA’s turbulent universities. This discontent is powerful and it is real, but it is not the outrage of the poor.
Bekker’s second finding is far less intuitive. It is that the EFF’s support base is fickle. A third of those who voted for the EFF in the 2016 local government elections no longer voted for it in the 2019 general election. And 35% of its 2021 supporters voted for another party in 2016.
So, the EFF is a party in which the flow of supporters coming in is as fierce as the flow going out. And it would appear from Bekker’s analysis that those flowing in are coming from the ANC, while those flowing out are going elsewhere. In other words, the party is acting as a gateway, a temporary stop, for those who no longer vote for the ANC.
I would draw two lessons from this finding. The first is that those voting for the EFF for the first time do so with caution, perhaps even with a heavy dose of doubt. The party is so obviously a product of the systemic corruption of which it complains. The political culture of ordinary South Africans is deeply sceptical, if not downright suspicious of those who exercise power. The notion that millions of South Africans are going to bring a swashbuckling populist to office seems fanciful to me.
But the second lesson to draw is not so positive. If the EFF is a gateway, where are voters going next? Almost certainly to ActionSA and the Patriotic Alliance. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing at all. SA’s electoral system of extreme proportional representation fragments the electorate. It creates narrow, chauvinist, unserious parties. And people hop from one to the other because they are frustrated and don’t know where next to go.
South Africans are sober and sceptical, which is perhaps the country’s saving grace. But the people are ill-served by their electoral system. When the governing party disappoints it should be voted out of power. It’s not hard to design an electoral system that will do that.
• Steinberg teaches part-time at Yale University.
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