SA’s electoral system is serving it badly. We like to think our low-threshold proportional representation (PR) system is optimally democratic, allowing the voices of ordinary people to be heard. But the very opposite is in fact the case. If any further proof is necessary it is the fate of the various parties that have formed in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
On the one hand, there are the serious new parties led by substantial people offering sophisticated policy agendas. They are all failing. Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi will be lucky if it gets 1% of the vote. Roger Jardine’s Change Starts Now buckled before it got into the starting blocks. Mmusi Maimane’s Build One SA is promising to be largely irrelevant.
Then along comes a bitter octogenarian with intemperate views. In his policy suite is the incarceration of pregnant teenagers, the abolition of same-sex civil unions, and the jettisoning of much of the legal system. The Jacob Zuma-endorsed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) party appears to be on track to get about 5% of the national vote. It may just be a game-changer.
Why is the crazy party starting so astonishingly well, while the serious parties are all but stillborn? The answer is that our electoral system is tailored for the crazies to bloom.
In a first-past-the-post, two-party system a lot of voters would love for pregnant teens to be sent to Robben Island and civil unions to be abolished. But they would never vote for these things because they simply would not be on offer.
In a first-past-the-post system it is in the interests of every party to aggregate as wide a range of interests as possible. To appeal to the extremes is suicidal. The 800,000-odd people who may be about to vote for Zuma’s policy agenda would be voting for other things.
How damaging might the MK party prove to be? It’s hard to say. Before its emergence the most credible analysts were putting the ANC’s percentage vote share in the late 40s. The MK party is likely to pull it down into the mid-40s. That is not yet a game-changer. If the ANC gets, say, 45% of the vote, it will most likely govern in coalition with the IFP.
But what if the most credible election watchers are out by just two or three percentage points? What if, thanks to the MK party, the ANC polls at 42%? Then SA will be in a whole new world and it won’t be a happy one.
There would most likely be a challenge to Cyril Ramaphosa’s leadership of the ANC. If he is ousted, the party’s new leader would most likely ask the DA to go into a national coalition. The DA may very well say no, as its core constituencies would probably never forgive it for throwing the ANC a lifeline. The EFF would beckon as a coalition partner, a truly awful prospect.
I’m not sure SA has the wherewithal to see itself through an extended moment of multipronged instability. At the very least, there would be a prolonged period of deep uncertainty, which would inflict major damage.
Does a reactionary new party led by a man motivated by vengeance deserve to cause so much trouble? It is an absurd situation, and it has arisen because SA designed its electoral system without thinking things through.
We think low-threshold PR allows fresh forces to sweep away encrusted old parties. It absolutely does not. The parties that flourish in the environment created by low-threshold PR are extremist parties with low ceilings of potential support. The system begs them into existence and then makes them kingmakers. Look at the far right in Israel, the Catalan separatists in Spain, the German far right. PR is puffing them up and making them big.
The rise of the MK party and the failures of the Roger Jardines is just the beginning. SA has built a system in which 5% of voters, their worst impulses coaxed from them by deeply unserious people, get to shape the future.
• Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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