The DA is discouraging voters from voting for smaller parties, saying doing so would split the opposition vote and hand victory to the ANC.
The opposition party is aiming to bring the ANC’s support to below 50% in the November 1 elections, paving the way for it to win outright majorities in councils or to form coalitions with smaller opposition parties which share its liberal principles.
“What we have seen is that there are coalitions of corruption and many of these coalitions are not really coalitions — it is an auctioning of positions,” says the DA’s federal chairperson, Ivan Meyer, of lessons the party has learnt from the last of its coalitions with other parties.
“[What we have seen is] you get the mayor and I get the deputy mayor. You get the municipal manager and I get the speaker. That’s not coalition politics, that’s not how coalition politics should be conceptualised. In SA we never had coalitions, we had people auctioning positions for each other so it is another form of cadre deployment under the disguise of coalitions,” he says.
Should the party fail to win an outright majority in a municipality, it is willing to have “discussions” with other parties.
In Ekurhuleni, where the ANC governs through a coalition with smaller opposition parties, DA mayoral candidate Refiloe Nt’sekhe is unconcerned that the ANC will retain the region with the help of other parties after the election.
“The smaller parties might have one or two seats but I don’t see them making an impact [so much so] that they assist the ANC into a coalition. I really think the ANC is going to go down below 50%. Some of these smaller parties are not even going to make a dent in the voting, they are just nice to be on the ballot paper and decorating the ballot paper,” she says.
The DA’s gains after the last municipal election, where it won the Cape Town metro outright and fashioned coalitions to control the Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane and Johannesburg metros, have been wiped out over the past five years as partnerships with smaller parties fell apart and some of its prominent leaders resigned to form their own parties.
Though the DA has retained control of Tshwane, its reputation in the metro has been tainted by infighting within the party and the constant change of the mayor since 2016. The DA’s results in the metros in the 2019 general election show that it will have to work hard to retain control of them in 2021, particularly those it now governs through fragile coalitions, such as Tshwane.
Solly Msimanga, the DA’s Gauteng provincial leader who resigned as Tshwane mayor in 2019 after the DA’s dismal performance in the national and provincial elections, added that one of the reasons for the failure of coalitions during his time as mayor was that parties put their own agendas ahead of the coalition.
“[In Tshwane] officials would run to that political party and win their favour and, once that begins to happen, you then have people who then want to protect people who do wrongdoing instead of doing what is principally right,” he says.
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