New South African Review 2. Paul Hoffman

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СКАЧАТЬ of an opposition whose appeal would go beyond race and identity and provide for a more issue-oriented politics. Yet in the two years after the 2009 election events panned out very differently. Cope descended into infighting, and the IFP was embroiled in an internal leadership battle which speeded its decline into irrelevance. In contrast, the DA appears to be further consolidating its position as the undisputed party of opposition, having in 2010 absorbed the Independent Democrats (ID), a small party drawing largely on the coloured vote in the Western Cape, whose leader, Patricia de Lille, is renowned as a feisty and vigorous campaigner and who was to be elected in the 2011 local government elections as the DA’s candidate for mayor of Cape Town. These developments would argue for the moment that the South African political system is en route to a de facto two-party system – although, as we shall argue in our conclusion, the DA’s status as the principal party of opposition could well be challenged in the future if a new political force were to arise to its left, drawing upon disaffection with the ANC among social movements and trade unions.

      There is little need to examine the damage which Cope and the IFP have inflicted upon themselves since the 2009 elections. It is sufficient to say that Cope has been riven by a conflict between its principal figures, Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa Lekota which has led to disputes about leadership and funding, and a hugely embarrassing national conference which saw actual fighting between the principals’ supporters. Never before in opposition circles has such intra-party bitterness been generated about so little, with the result that many of those who originally saw in it a new beginning have fled from it, thoroughly disillusioned.

      Meanwhile, the IFP has been torn by an internal battle between founder leader Mangosutho Buthelezi and Zanele Magwaza-Msibi, the party’s former national chair. As mayor of Zululand district, Magwaza-Msibi established a creditable record for delivery and efficiency, and had seemed the most likely figure to reverse the IFP’s decline in KwaZulu-Natal, where the party’s vote had collapsed to a mere 22.4 per cent in 2009 compared to 50.5 per cent in 1994. But Buthelezi, aged eighty-two, like many an African leader before him, has been constantly and humbly obedient to the demands of his subservient party heirarchy that he retain the leadership, while Magwaza-Msibi, drummed out of the party by his supporters, proceeded to form her own National Freedom Party. In short, the two parties which presented the major alternative vehicles of opposition in 2009 (securing thirty and eighteen seats in the national assembly respectively, compared to the DA’s sixty-seven) are in a state of seemingly irretrievable decline.

      That the collapse of Cope and the IFP would offer a new opportunity for the DA to consolidate its position as the principal challenger to the ANC seems to have been confirmed by the results of the 2011 local government elections, in which the party’s vote climbed to nearly 24 per cent of the votes cast (in the 2006 local elections it had obtained only 14.7 per cent). In contrast, the third largest share of the vote was taken by the IFP with just 3.6 per cent, followed by the NFP with 2.4 per cent and Cope a miserly 2.1 per cent. The remarkable increase in the DA’s vote appears to be principally an outcome of the squeezing by the DA of its opposition rivals but, nonetheless, the party claimed in the wake of the contest to have increased its support among black Africans to five per cent from the one per cent it achieved in the 2009 general elections.

      All this raises questions anew about whether the DA is proving able to overcome its image (as sustained by the ANC’s harping on its origins), as a party of reaction and racism, unwilling to take South Africa beyond the lingering racial contours of apartheid. This chapter therefore examines the background and prospects for the DA, addressing three themes in particular: first, why white (and particularly Afrikaner) voters have come to favour the DA; second, how the party is attempting to present itself as one which promotes a nonracial South African patriotism; and third, the DA’s understanding of political opposition and the obstacles which lie in the way of its making further electoral progress.

      THE ELECTORAL RISE OF THE DA

      The DA belongs to the liberal tradition in South African politics which was represented during the apartheid era by the Progressive Party (later to become the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) in 1977). From 1961 to 1974 the Progressive Party’s only presence in parliament was that robust defender of human rights, Helen Suzman (Giliomee, 2009). The PFP became the Democratic Party (DP) in 1989, following an amalgamation with other liberal parties and splinter groups, and participated in the multiparty talks of the early 1990s which brought apartheid to an end. During these years, the liberal voice was audible if not powerful, yet its presence should not be overlooked as a persistent parliamentary critic of apartheid.

      In post-apartheid South Africa, the DP formed an alliance with the New National

      Party (NNP) in 2000 and became the DA. The NNP was the National Party (NP) of the

      apartheid era; the addition of ‘new’ in 1997 was an attempt to dispense with its racist history. The NNP later cut its links with the DA and formed a new alliance with the ANC (with which it had served in the Government of National Unity (GNU) between 1994 and 1996) in 2004. This, however, was not disadvantageous to the DA whose support has steadily increased. If we consider that in the first democratic elections of 1994 the DP’s seven seats were swamped by the NP’s eighty-two, the party can be seen to have made major progress. In one sense, the 2009 result confirms that the DA, as the vanguard of parliamentary opposition, is numerically less strong than was the NP in 1994. But unlike the NP/NNP which was constrained as an opposition party by virtue of its involvement in the GNU (De Klerk, 1999) the DA was more adversarial in its approach. Certainly, by 2009, after a prognosis following the country’s second democratic election that the ‘DA now stands to become the home of the majority of whites, coloureds and Indians’ (Southall, 2001: 277), it was evident that both the white and coloured community of the Western Cape regarded the DA to be their party. But it is worth noting that the DA has not attracted the same level of support from the coloured community in the Northern Cape, a significant regional variation which will be touched upon below.

      When apartheid ended and the parties that had traditionally received the support of white voters had to find their way in the new political dispensation it was not immediately evident what the DA’s political trajectory would be. Former leader of the DA, Tony Leon, acknowledges that when democracy arrived in 1994 the liberal tradition in South Africa lacked orientation: ‘South African liberalism entered the post-apartheid era with a sense of disorientation … under apartheid [it] didn’t really need a map. It was anti-apartheid; it opposed the National Party’s authoritarian state and the tyranny that upheld it’ (Leon, 2006: 38). But Leon himself sent out highly ambiguous messages. On the one hand, after he assumed the party leadership following the first democratic election in 1994 he initially appeared more concerned about attracting support from other traditionally ‘white’ parties (notably the NNP) than about expanding the party’s appeal to black voters; on the other hand, while claiming that ‘redressing the imbalances of the past’ was one of the two most important challenges facing South Africa (the other was achieving sustainable growth), he vigorously attacked what he termed the ANC’s ‘race-based’ policies without putting in place a serious alternative whereby historic redress might be achieved, save by referring to the necessity of creating an ‘opportunity society’ and expanding opportunities for all (Leon, 2008: 501). Meanwhile, the party’s slogan for the 1999 election campaign, ‘Fight Back’, might well have proved effective in rallying the white vote but it was far too easily parodied by its critics as sending out the message to its supporters to ‘Fight Black’, and could also be presented as a coded appeal to coloured and Indian voters on the grounds that they were not really ‘black enough’ to qualify for affirmative action under the ANC.

      The СКАЧАТЬ