The rats and mice unity party: John Matisonn

Key topics:Small parties face extinction, with mergers seen as survival strategyActionSA rejects merger, citing unfair share despite larger support baseGOOD, Rise Mzansi, and BOSA push ahead with merger talks for relevance.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By John Matisonn.As political parties with only one or two MPs face decline and perhaps extinction, small parties are consolidating. Three political parties are at an advanced stage of talks to merge, and Action South Africa has absorbed a number of local parties since the 2024 election.Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi and Build One South Africa’s Mmusi Maimane have both indicated they hope to announce a merger that includes the GOOD Party soon. GOOD secretary general Brett Heron confirmed these discussions.ActionSA, which has absorbed 12 micro-parties in the last year, declined to join the three after Bosa offered a smaller say than ActionSA leaders believed their numbers deserve. The Patriotic Alliance and Freedom Front Plus will remain separate, and may grow their support among their ethnic constituencies – white conservatives with an Afrikaner identity for the Freedom Front and coloured voters for the PA. In an interview, ActionSA chairperson Michael Beaumont made his case for staying separate: “ActionSA would be 55% of the new party based on the 2024 election results. Bosa didn’t want proportionality and relative strength to factor in. It wanted ActionSA to get only 25%, when we’re bigger than all three combined.” By absorbing 12 local parties since the elections last year, ActionSA grew its 2021 haul of 91 councillors to 140 across seven provinces.At the Daily Maverick’s The Gathering event in Cape Town on Thursday, Maimane, Zibi and ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba acknowledged the pressure on them to band together.Maimane called it “narrowing down the ballot paper,” Zibi acknowledged that none of the parties had all the necessary talent, and Mashaba agreed that South Africans want to see less parties..Read more:.Why I’m done with small parties: Ivo Vegter.The negotiators seek to make a virtue of necessity. At 74, GOOD founder Patricia de Lille, has been a public representative of the Pan Africanist Congress, the Independent Democrats, the Democratic Alliance and GOOD. She is likely to have difficulty retaining her seat in Parliament without a merger.GOOD still has 40 councillors in the Western Cape, but her constituency is under threat from the PA. GOOD has begun working with Rise Mzansi in locl elections. In August 2024, RISE Mansi's Axolile Notywala stepped into a GOOD councillor vacancy in the Cape Town City Council. The two parties are among the 10 in the Government of National Unity (GNU). But ActionSA also has its work cut out for it as a small party that made headway on the back of leader Herman Mashaba’s reputation as former DA mayor of Johannesburg. He campaigned on the promise never to go into a coalition with the African National Congress, and lost credibility when he broke that promise by bailing out the ANC in a budget vote, and joining with them to wrest control of Tshwane from the DA.Asked about a recent leaked opinion poll from the DA that showed the DA with at least 40% in each of the Gauteng metros, Beaumont said ActionSA’s confidential polling did not reflect those numbers, and joked that the numbers “must be the effect of hallucinogens in the Western Cape.”

The rats and mice unity party: John Matisonn

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