I recently learned that the IRR published a rebuttal to my criticism of the DA last year. I know, I know, I’m a little late to the party here, but I think it deserves a (very belated) reply.
Centre-what?
After the previous election, I argued that the DA had lost votes by moving closer to the centre of SA politics. In response, the IRR wrote, “[T]he DA isn’t ‘moving to the centre’. The previous iterations of the DA were always at the centre: the DA lost voters to the ‘right’ because it was moving to the left, against its liberal principles, into an already crowded terrain.”
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The problem here is, I think, emblematic of the problem with SA’s political opposition – a refusal to grapple with the reality on the ground.
You see, the political spectrum is not like the electromagnetic spectrum. There is no such thing as a “political centre” the way that there is such a thing as the centre of the earth. The political spectrum is a relative thing.
I have lived in SA, Europe, and the United States and I can tell you this for sure: The “political centre” exists only in the minds of a specific group of citizens.
The “centre” in the US is not the same as the “centre” in Europe. The US political centre features untrammelled capitalism, limited workers’ rights, limited taxes, and an emphasis on the right for two individuals to enter into any contracts they like. The centre in, say, Sweden, features strong social protections, direct income support for the poor and for children, free healthcare and education, and high taxes. A left-leaning party in the US would look pretty much like right-wing libertarians on the Swedish political spectrum. There is no fixed, unchanging, North Star-style political centre.
Now, when the IRR writes that the DA moved to the left, not the centre, the IRR is imagining a political spectrum that looks like something like this (meant as a rough illustration and not a scientific scale):
This is, however, not reality. In any country, the political centre is whatever the average citizen thinks it is. We can tell by glancing at, say, any election result for the last 20 years, that well over half of South Africans reckon the ANC is the party that makes the most sense. This is what it means that the ANC keeps winning all the elections.
By definition, then, the ANC is at the centre – it is the mean, the average. Voting patterns and political research, therefore, suggest that the actual political spectrum in South Africa looks more like this (roughly – this is not a scientific scale, just an illustration):
I’m not arguing that the DA is not the “party of the centre” in an academic, political philosophy/history of economic thought/Platonic ideal sense. I’m arguing that it is to the right of the actual political centre in South Africa as it exists.
The issue here is that the DA needs to appeal to actual voters in SA, not to theoretical perfectly “enlightened” voters who recognise that the DA is politically centrist. Any political party must work with the polity it has, not an imagined, more desirable polity. The trick to winning elections is to appeal the most to the most voters. The DA has some good policy ideas, but they are not appealing to most voters (this is obvious from the fact that fewer people are voting DA these days than were a few years back).
Which brings me to a second point.
Unregistered voters ain’t DA voters
In its rebuttal, the IRR reiterates the DA’s argument that the party would fare better if it was able to appeal to unregistered voters or non-voters – people who are eligible to vote but haven’t registered, and people who are registered but don’t bother to actually vote.
This is a big group – perhaps as much as 50% of the electorate falls into these two categories. Any political party able to capture this voting bloc would do well, and it is natural for the DA to want to capture these folks.
But there is no reason to think that these voters – who are, for the most part, young, black, unemployed, and good and ticked off – would flock to vote for the DA if they registered. In fact, as I argued previously, it seems much more likely that these are potential EFF voters. If the EFF could build up its ground operations and get more aggressive about recruiting unregistered voters, it could give the ANC a real run for its money.
But the DA has shown no real ability to attract young, unemployed, angry, black voters (or, if we are very honest, pretty much any black voters at all). Given current racial and socioeconomic voting patterns, I would guess – with a high degree of confidence – that if all eligible voters actually voted, the DA’s vote share would decrease. This is because the type of people who vote DA – white, professional, employed, homeowners and so on – are already registered and active voters.
Rooting for a real opposition
I know that this all comes across as a bit negative. But I am genuinely concerned that the DA seems to be struggling greatly to carve out a viable political position. Given the political realities of SA, it is going to have to choose whether to be a minority-rights party representing white interests or a mass party with a more centrist set of policy proposals (centrist in the South African sense – closer to the political centre as it exists in SA). The ANC is desperately in need of some real, serious political competition and I am afraid that if the DA doesn’t make wise choices, that competition will come from the EFF instead. If that happens, SA will move ever-more aggressively to the extreme left. The DA must develop principled policy ideas that appeal to real South African voters as a matter of enormous urgency.
