dissenting political voices are not silenced. The DA’s political rise was helped by the fact that in 1999 its main competitors either lacked a clear vision or offered policies that were thought unrealistic. This proved to be vital to the DA’s attracting the Afrikaner vote, a significant achievement given that during apartheid Afrikaners had had little time for the liberal tradition in South African politics.
Perhaps one of the most noteworthy achievements of the DA is its success in keeping the white community politically participative but, following its success in the 2009 national and 2011 local government elections, the strategic objective of the DA is to make inroads into the black community. Embracing the symbols which celebrate South Africanness and ethnoracial inclusivity, elevating blacks to senior positions, and (perhaps above all) having members work in black communities – particularly if they are black themselves – can help to multiply political support. Of themselves, however, these points are unlikely to be sufficient to turn the DA into a more immediate and serious electoral threat to the ANC. Political conditions also have a part to play: the more South African society experiences the socially decaying effects of crime, unemployment, poverty, and chronic health issues associated with HIV/AIDS, the greater the opportunity for the DA to appeal to voters. Against this, the DA’s continued espousal of ‘free market’ economic policies, albeit dressed up as a quest for the ‘opportunity society’, does little to appeal to a black majority for whom vigorous state intervention in the economy is necessary if greater equalisation and redistribution are to be achieved. There can thus be no automatic assumption that the DA will transform itself into a majority party, even if the ANC’s standing among the majority black community were to be undermined. Indeed, it is rather more possible that the DA will be overtaken by new formations of the left.
At its launch, Cope claimed, in essence, to be the ‘real’ ANC because the mother body had been hijacked by a mix of opportunists and leftists united behind Zuma (Booysen, 2009). It offered little in ideological terms save to say that it would provide more of the same policies as had been pursued under Mbeki, pursued more efficiently. Its present implosion suggests that a party lacking a clear ideological underpinning and which is unable to provide a clear alternative, especially to the African majority of voters, is unlikely to make any significant impact upon South African politics. Similarly, the continuing long-term decline of the IFP suggests the shallowness of any politics located in ethnicity and regionalism, especially if – as is the case of a party which once ruled the KwaZulu homeland and which remained a major player in provincial government in KwaZulu-Natal until 2009 – it becomes divorced from the opportunity to wield state patronage and power. The long-term attention to opposition to the ANC may need to switch to social formations which, at the moment, are outside the formal political arena.
Conventionally, major expectations regarding the inroads that are being made into the ANC’s electoral dominance have centred around a breakaway from the Tripartite Alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), some believing that this could offer the DA the prospect of coalescing with an openly pro-capitalist ANC. However, this scenario has always been flawed by its various assumptions: that the ANC and the DA, given their mutual differences and hostility, could patch up an ideological alliance; that Cosatu itself is homogeneous (whereas, in the face of a divide, pro- and anti-ANC factions could develop within the federation itself and within individual unions); and that the SACP would necessarily act in harmony with the trade union movement. At the approach of two decades of the ANC in power, the present political situation seems more fluid than at any time since 1994. Granted, despite the various present tensions between Cosatu and the ANC, and indeed between Cosatu and the SACP (which today has senior members in government and is more closely identified with the latter’s policies under the presidency of Jacob Zuma) over economic policy (see Pillay, this volume), the Tripartite Alliance seems electorally as firm as ever. Having led the charge within the ANC to displace Mbeki, Cosatu is unlikely for the foreseeable future to abandon a party machinery which places it in a position of considerable influence. Nonetheless, Cosatu is also conscious of growing fractures within the ANC’s traditional constituency, and is seemingly edging towards a closer relationship with emerging social movements whereby it may forge a viable political relationship between workers in the formal and informal economies.
Recent years have seen a massive increase in what are broadly (if often misleadingly) referred to as service delivery protests (whose thrust can range from protests against lack of housing, water and other provisions through to struggles against local ANC leaderships, often seen as involved in webs of patronage and corruption). Broadly, community- and issue-based organisations have emerged which, with considerable popular backing from impoverished townships and rural areas, vocally and often violently contest the outcomes of ANC rule. More worryingly for the ANC, these various groupings are groping towards some kind of broad unity, coming together in recent months in first, a major meeting convened in October 2010 and attended by Cosatu in December 2009 (without the ANC being invited), and second, at a Conference of the Democratic Left held at the University of the Witwatersrand in January 2011. Out of the latter came a Democratic Left Front (DLF) which, whilst broadly reminiscent of the United Democratic Front of the 1980s which led the internal assault on apartheid, vowed not to make what one former Robben Islander termed the mistake of collapsing the organisation into branches of the ANC.
At present, the prospects of such a grouping transforming itself into a political party ready to challenge the hegemony of the ANC are limited. The DLF is in its infancy, and the wide ideological differences between various of its groupings could yet reduce it to infantile disorder. Nonetheless, given the steady erosion of the ANC vote as a proportion of the voting age population (Schulz-Herzenberg, 2009), continuing social strains and incessant local protests, the longer-term potential for a new party of the left is evident, especially if – at some point in the future – Cosatu was to forswear the Tripartite Alliance.
What do such present and potential developments portend for the present parties of opposition, and most notably the DA? Our argument here is that, despite recent gains, they promise rather little. It is possible that, even if reduced to electoral rumps, parties like Cope and the IFP might pick up support in local areas – and yet, as recent history has shown, their mobilisational capacities seem in terminal decline (and they could well end up by merging with the DA). In contrast, the DA is making determined efforts to overcome the limits of its past by adopting an aggressively cross-racial appeal and what it presents as its impressive record in governance in the Western Cape. Yet therein lies the rub, for its success in the Western Cape remains bounded by its particular appeal to the coloured community which perceives itself as marginalised by the ANC. Despite its recent inroads into the African vote, and despite the fact that in the recent 2011 local government contest, the DA made gains on the ANC in eight out of the nine provinces, there is no other province which is liable to fall into its hands at the next general election. The DA, in short, despite its best efforts, remains caught in a cleft stick around ‘race’. Moreover, its pro-market ideology seems unlikely to appeal to constituencies which provide a foundation for radical social movements, or a nascent party of the left whose emergent rallying calls are for a ‘solidarity society’ and ‘eco-socialism’.
The DA will continue, for the foreseeable future, to provide the ANC with vigorous opposition within the arena of formal politics. In that, its contribution in harrying the ANC regarding corruption, incompetence and poor delivery remains invaluable, but the prospects of its dislodging ANC dominance (save in the Western Cape) continue to appear remote. Such a task can only lie with a political movement drawing upon much wider social foundations among the majority poor and which captures segments of the ANC’s own historic constituency. Social movements can go right or left, and the challenge for South Africa in the future is whether they will be able to forge a coherent alternative to the ANC and whether that will deepen democracy or undermine it.
NOTES
1 The present chapter draws heavily upon Neil Southern (forthcoming 2011). Political opposition and the challenges of a dominant party system: The Democratic Alliance in South Africa, in Journal of Contemporary African Studies.