ANTHONY BUTLER: Lacking zing, opposition parties need to deal with key voter concerns

A focus on unemployment, crime and corruption would bring more votes

First published in Business Day and BusinessLive

15 SEPTEMBER 2023

There is a lot to like about opposition parties in SA. The DA has open leadership elections and transparent candidate selection processes. The EFF has bluntly stated policy positions. Even smaller parties hold the governing party accountable for its actions and criticise abuses of power. Together, these parties counterbalance the ANC and contribute to the vitality of a democratic society. 

While this situation is preferable to the personalised politics and fragmented party systems that prevail in many other countries, there is little sign that opposition parties can actually evict the ANC in 2024. This is puzzling because it is sometimes difficult to see how the ANC could do a worse job of governing the country. 

After a decade pot-holed with economic stagnation, corruption and rotational blackouts, opinion surveys show that citizens were already gatvol with the ANC by 2019. Yet the great liberation movement still managed to secure 58% of the vote. 

Illuminating research from political scientists Collette Schulz-Herzenberg and Bob Mattes, recently published in the journal Democratization, explores opposition parties’ failure to capitalise on the opportunities a languishing ANC presents. They show that fewer than a quarter of potential voters think the ANC is doing a good job of running the country. The trouble, though, is that most people don’t think an opposition party could do better.  

The proportion of eligible electors who registered and then turned out to vote fell from 86% in 1994 to 49% in 2019. The proportion of the voting age population who voted for the ANC was 39% in 2009. By 2019, this had fallen to just 28%. 

Those deserting the ANC are abandoning elections far more often than they are voting for other parties. Opposition support has flatlined at a little more than 20% for the past three elections. Worse still, even former opposition party loyalists are staying home on election day.  

Mattes and Schulz-Herzenberg take opposition parties to task for significant failings, which they claim may lie behind this predicament. They point to parties’ failure to court potential voters between elections, to offer coherent and credible messages, and to focus their campaigns on issues that appeal beyond their core supporters. 

They suggest the DA ran a “relatively anodyne” campaign in 2019, “focussed on inclusiveness and national unity, in which the impact of corruption played a marginal role”. Meanwhile the EFF “ignored the concerns of the majority of voters and chose to focus instead primarily on land redistribution and the nationalisation of key industries”. Neither party targeted the issues electors say are important to them: unemployment, crime and corruption. 

In their view, “unless opposition parties are able to do a better job convincing dissatisfied voters that they are a legitimate alternative, the ANC will continue to win a large proportion of a progressively shrinking pool of election-day voters, and dissatisfaction with government output will turn into dissatisfaction with the democratic regime”. 

This trenchant analysis may be a little hard on exhausted opposition party strategists. It is difficult for parties to change what voters wrongly think they stand for. The ANC remains a wily campaigner. Moreover, ANC breakaway parties, notably the EFF, retain umbilical links to the mother body. Electors know this and in consequence will not trust them — and other opposition parties cannot engage with them in sustainable coalition discussions. 

None of this is grounds for fatalism. Disgruntled voters may have been dormant in part because ANC victory has always seemed inevitable since 1994. If opposition party leaders can create a credible vision for the future, and it looks like the ANC is genuinely vulnerable to defeat, we may see a sudden surge of enthusiasm for change among the electorate in 2023. 

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.