By Felicity Duncan
A recently released Ipsos poll – Biznews published the full details here – reveals some very worrying political problems in South Africa. In a refreshing change of pace, however, none of them are of the ANC’s making.
There’s a lot to digest in the poll results. For my money, however, it reveals two particularly important and interesting things.
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- A third of South African voters don’t feel that there’s a party out there that expresses their views
- Voters do not trust the opposition parties and the opposition leaders
Let’s break this down.
According to Ipsos, 37% of registered voters (and 38% of people who are eligible to vote, whether registered or not) say that there is no political party in SA that expresses their views.
Now, there are, according to the IEC, 563 parties registered to participate in the 2018 elections. There are 56 parties represented in national legislative bodies. But in actual, practical reality, there are three parties in SA: The ANC, the DA, and the EFF. The rest have a very marginal impact on the country – the Big Three are where the action happens.
And, according to Ipsos, almost 40% of registered voters do not feel that any of these three parties express their personal views. This is an indictment of SA’s political class, particularly the opposition parties, which should have the entrepreneurial spirit to identify why voters aren’t feeling heard and take steps to change that.
The second key point is that not only do people not feel that the parties represent their views, they also fundamentally don’t trust the opposition parties. Ipsos asked people whether or not they trusted each of the big three parties and then subtracted the negatives from the positives to give a trust metric.
Only the ANC came out positive – out of every 100 voters, about 68.5 trusted the ANC while 31.5 didn’t. When it came to the DA, that was almost reversed – 67.5 didn’t trust the party, while only 32.5 did. The EFF fared even worse – 70 didn’t trust it, and 30 did. Voters only really trusted their own parties.
These twin facts – the serious lack of trust that most voters have in the opposition and the high proportion of voters who don’t feel represented by any party – are a serious problem for SA. And they are, specifically, a problem with South Africa’s opposition parties. And I believe they point even more particularly to a problem with the DA.
Let me explain. Admittedly, 40% of voters say that no party, the ANC included, represents their views. However, when voters are disillusioned with the status quo, it is the job of opposition political entrepreneurs to take advantage of that by creating a fresh alternative or intelligently marketing themselves to dissatisfied voters.
This is, actually, something the EFF has done quite effectively. Malema and his crew correctly noted that the poorest and angriest young voters were looking for an alternative to the ANC and have capitalised on this, picking up a decent chunk of votes.
Indeed, the EFF’s share of the vote looks likely to grow from 6% in 2014 to somewhere between 7% and 11% this time around (personally, I think it will be on the higher end of the range). Admittedly, a lot of people don’t trust the EFF. But it has succeeded in creating a political something from nothing and as more South Africans fall into poverty, the EFF will pick up more votes.
The DA, however, has done much worse than the EFF. Although there is clearly a pool of voters out there looking for a fresh alternative, the DA has simply continued to offer the same fairly milquetoast neoliberal platform that it has been offering for 25 years, despite the fact that it clearly cuts little ice with voters.
After all, in 2014 the DA captured over 22% of the vote, but per Ipsos’ data, that’s going to fall to something between 14% and 18% this year (probably on the low end of the range). Despite the disastrous mismanagement of the ANC’s tenure over the last ten years, the DA has made no forward progress – it earned just over 16% of the vote in 2009 and will probably get a little less this time.
In short, while the EFF has created a new constituency and is aggressively expanding it, the DA has essentially stagnated. This is reflected in the low levels of trust that non-DA voters feel for the party. But it also reflects something more.
Take a look at the chart below, which shows the share of the vote by province in the 2014 elections, when the DA did particularly well. You’ll notice that the party grabbed most of its votes in the Western Cape and, to a lesser extent, Gauteng. Those were the only provinces in which is grabbed more than 20% of the vote. In contrast, the ANC only captured less than 60% of the vote in two provinces.
In other words, the DA is in real danger of becoming a regional Western Cape party, like Bloc Québécois in Canada, which primarily represents the narrow interests of French-Canadians in Quebec at a national level.
The DA desperately needs to broaden its mass, national appeal. It’s no use the party complaining that voters should understand why its policies are the right ones. Voters don’t trust the DA, and it’s the DA’s job to take voters as it finds them and figure out how to build trust and promote its policies in a way that has mass appeal. If the DA fails to become a truly national party, then the role of primary opposition will be assumed by the growing EFF, a potentially scary prospect.
Democracy works best when voters feel like they have real choices. That so many South Africans don’t trust the opposition and don’t see opposition parties as reflective of their views is a major political weakness in our democracy.
