As the 2024 election approaches, opposition parties are quietly confident that they can, if they somehow co-operate without losing their individual identities, push the governing ANC out and take power in the national parliament.
It’s ambitious, to say the least. Underestimating the power of the ANC election machine is a sure way of inflicting pain on yourself, and SA voters are incredibly hard to move. The opposition parties so far gathered into DA leader John Steenhuisen’s moonshot pact — now the “equal partnership” that calls itself the Multi-Party Charter (MPC) — gathered just 27.4% of the vote in the 2019 election to the ANC’s 57.5% and EFF’s 10.8%.
Back then the parties now in the MPC were the DA, the IFP, the FF+ and the ACDP. They have been joined since forming the charter by Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA and three other smaller parties that will struggle to get much support in 2024.
But ActionSA is a breakaway from the DA and appears to measure success in local elections by the extent to which it weakens the DA, so it is hard to understand how its addition might expand the vote of the charter group overall, despite the fact that it has a popular African leader. If anything, by splitting what might have been the DA vote in an area it might strengthen the ANC.
But this is politics, and the permutations ahead of an election are impossible to compute, especially with coalitions on the table. If it is any help, the closest call before the May 8 2019 election was made by Intellidex (now called Krutham) a few days out, from a poll of polls.
It got both the ANC and the DA votes almost exactly right. An Ipsos poll done between March 22 and April 17 called the ANC vote with great accuracy but wildly underestimated the final DA vote. Most of the polls run in the second half of 2018 underestimated the final ANC vote by some margin.
That may be where we are now, with poll after poll this year predicting that if an election were held at the time of the poll the ANC vote would fall below 50% nationally. But if history is a reliable guide the governing party should strengthen in the coming months despite the economic hardship it has brought upon the country. So it may not fall below 50% after all, and if it does it could be by just a little. At 46%, which would be a huge fall, the ANC still has lots of options.
At the top of the list would be the EFF, which some analysts see as a natural partner to the ANC. I think they overestimate the ties between the two. That said, if it were desperate enough to stay in power the ANC is capable of agreeing to almost anything that guarantees it. An EFF premier for the Free State? Julius Malema as foreign minister?
We don’t know, and the fact that the DA is in a pre-election alliance of a sort with other like-minded centre-right parties doesn’t mean it wouldn’t jump if the ANC offered it a grand coalition. Not everyone in the DA leadership thinks Steenhuisen’s MPC is a fine idea. They fear that at some stage the pressure to include Gayton McKenzie’s ultra-populist PA in it is going to become more than intense.
But at 46% the ANC could also do business with about eight small parties with less than 0.5% of the vote and one or two MPs each.
Increasingly, wise political heads like Corné Mulder, chief whip of the FF+, which will also fight the DA for the Afrikaner vote, try to crystallise the challenge for the opposition to just one number. If they get there, they “win” in the sense that they may be safe to nominate the next president.
The number is 210 — the seats the “good” opposition need to install a president, or indeed a speaker. There are 400 seats in parliament. Right now the ANC has 230, the EFF 44. To get their combined total below 200 they would have to lose at least 37 seats, and the MPC and a few non-members of it would need to gain them.
That is just an enormous job, and in all honesty it is hard to see it happening, however dire our circumstances. If it does, it could be thanks to smaller new parties like Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi, or former DA leader Mmusi Maimane’s Bosa, working the rural ANC base beyond media reach.
Privately Zibi, a former editor of this newspaper, is confident of a good result. He believes north of 5% of the national vote is a real possibility. That would give Rise Mzansi about 20 MPs, a remarkable result the first time out if he can find the funding to get people out on the day. It’s worth listening to him, because the voters he is talking to have been, thus far, diehard ANC.
The problem opponents of the ANC have in 2024 is not only its formidable election machine. It is the parties themselves. Faced with the prospect of some big funders parachuting a candidate of their own into their midst, they have chosen to declare they will do the 2024 election the old-fashioned way — as separate parties that will talk to each other about a coalition afterwards.
But expecting an extraordinary kill while hunting their prey with antiquated ideas is like doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It’s madness, but it’s what they want. Parties always and everywhere put themselves first, and I’m afraid we’re in for more of the same next year.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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