Will South Africa’s democracy survive 2024 unscathed?

By: Stef Terblanche

In a worrying recent article, the Financial Times poses the uncomfortable question: can democracy survive 2024? It notes that a historic number of elections will take place around the world this year, but that autocracy is spreading, and young people are rejecting the democratic status quo.

With about half the adult population of the world casting their votes in elections this year, the Financial Times notes that, “These elections take place against a backdrop of spreading illiberalism around the world, the weakening of independent institutions in a number of big democracies and a creeping disillusionment among younger people about the very point of elections”.

To some extent, some of these trends also apply to South Africa, one of the record number of countries that will go to the polls this year. Most certainly growing disillusionment with the democratic status quo among South Africans, especially the youth, seems to apply, at least over the last few years up to this point.

But could there, hypothetically, be a bigger, more sinister threat that could end or severely dent the three-decade-old South African democratic project this year? Or, on the other hand, will South Africa’s democracy reach a defining maturity milestone this year?

I shall return to these hypothetical, speculative questions shortly; but let’s first look at the broader global context of the status of democracy in a mega election year and how South Africa is affected. With more elections in one year than ever before, one would imagine that democracy was entering a golden age. However, the sobering reality is that elections don’t equal democracy. Correctly administered, free and fair, and well supported though, they should be an important fundamental part of any well-functioning democracy. But that’s certainly not always the case. And various research projects around the world have found that democracy is actually on a downward slide.

A case in point is neighbouring Zimbabwe where elections have regularly taken place since independence. But they have seldom been free and fair, thus significantly annulling their democratic value. Zimbabwe today is probably considerably less free, fair and democratic than it was several decades ago when Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF first came to power.

And yet elections have regularly been held there with much fanfare since then… accompanied by threats, police violence, disappearing opposition candidates or supporters, disruptions and banning of opposition rallies, harassment and jailing of opposition figures, election irregularities, and more. And of course, a ruling party that always wins. Is that democracy? One can only wonder, where have the AU and SADC been, institutions that should jealously be guarding democracy in the region and continent.

Democracy in retreat

Nonetheless, the Financial Times’ article goes on to lament that despite more than 70 nations going to the polls this year and some praiseworthy democratic advances in some parts of the world, “overall, surveys chart a retreat in the democratic spirit after a high-water mark in the decade after the end of the Soviet Union and apartheid in the 1990s”.

As also noted are the findings of the V-Dem Institute, which assesses democracies’ health on the five principles of electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian, that the quality of democracy enjoyed by an average citizen in the world in 2022 has receded back to the levels of 1986. And Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, in its Global State of Democracy Initiative, found that 2023 marked the sixth consecutive year in which democracy declined in half of all countries – the longest retreat since their records began in 1975. A number of other research entities around the world have also similarly noted the decline of democracy.

According to the Financial Times democracy’s difficulties will play out this year in four distinct electoral cultures. The first is a “tyrannical group” of countries – including Belarus, Russia and Rwanda – where rulers jail opponents and run a charade of an election culminating in 90-per cent majorities or higher. A second group comprises performative democracies such as Iran, Tunisia and Bangladesh, where leaders may just about allow the opposition to compete but not to win. Zimbabwe probably belongs to a hybrid of these two groups.

In the third group, to which the article assigns South Africa, the erosion is more subtle, it says, with leaders winning power in genuinely free and fair elections but then overseeing non-liberal policies, as has happened in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, and institutions taking strain. The fourth group encompasses the older democracies, where the centrist establishment is threatened by further gains of populists at the ballot box.

However, the article singles out the possible re-election of “the demagogic (Donald) Trump in November’s American elections that would threaten the most damage to democracy”. For South Africa, there could be a parallel phenomenon to Trump and his understanding of and approach to democratic elections should a specific hypothetical scenario play out here, to which I will return.

Declining youth support

But for the Financial Times an even bigger threat than Donald Trump, is the decline in youthful support for democracy. “Possibly the most arresting finding in polls about democracy is how younger voters are increasingly tolerant of autocracy,” it says. That certainly is also a factor that has taken shape in South Africa where in general, voter participation in elections has consistently been falling while young people have turned their backs on elections in even greater numbers.

South Africa’s democracy can be said to be threatened from a number of different angles. But one overriding angle is that after 30 years of rule by the same party many if not the majority of citizens have seen no improvement in their lives. Instead, based on a wide variety of indicators, opinion polls, public protests, and other events, many have arguably experienced deterioration. At the same time governance became increasingly tainted by corruption, self-enrichment of a small political-business elite became widely evident, South Africa remained one of the most unequal societies in the world, massive crime and corruption continue worsening and impacting lives, unemployment and poverty levels are among the highest in the world, and the commitment to the lofty democratic ideals of 1994 appear to have waned.

This undoubtedly has undermined trust in and support for South Africa’s constitutional democracy and its political systems and institutions, especially among younger people. It is also perhaps the single biggest factor that played a role in the destructive riots of July 2021 in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.

That trust in our democratic system and institutions is on the decline, has been borne out by a survey conducted in 2018, just ahead of the 2019 elections, by the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Development in Africa. It found that 58% of South African youths believed meeting their basic needs (such as finding jobs, income, housing) was more important than voting, or having access to courts, or enjoying freedom of speech and expression. Only 27% out of the 3,431 young people surveyed believed democratic rights were more important.

Similarly, an Afrobarometer survey in 2021 found that South Africans’ trust in a variety of institutions was at its lowest since first being measured by Afrobarometer in 2006. Trust in elected representatives was especially weak, and two-thirds of respondents would be willing to forego elections if a non-elected government could provide improved security and better services. And an Ipsos survey conducted in 2022 also indicated that less than half of South Africans in all adult age groups had favourable impressions of political parties and elections, resulting in low voter turnouts.

Despite a successful voter registration weekend held by South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in early February, more than 14 million South Africans of voting age, mostly young people, were still not registered for the 2024 national general elections. These are highly worrying trends that could also have a profound impact on the outcome of our own elections this year. Our last elections, the local government elections of 2021, may have set the stage for what will follow this year. Those elections recorded a record-low voter turnout of 45.87% and an ANC majority slashed down to 55%, the ruling party’s worst performance since coming to power.

It is clear that the idea of democracy is already under considerable pressure in South Africa. It therefore shouldn’t be a surprise that already in 2022, The Economist Intelligence Unit rated South Africa a “flawed democracy”, while some analysts and commentators argue that South Africa represents a dysfunctional state, others calling it a failing or failed state. None of that bodes well for the democratic ideal.

What happens next?

Meanwhile, while the Financial Times reminds us that South Africa’s ruling ANC is facing its first truly competitive election race in 30 years, it poses the question: “Are free elections, for all that they are worth celebrating, an insufficient guide to a democracy’s health? And is what happens next its real test?” And therein lies the crunch.

What happens next? It is common cause that a number of leading opinion polls have over the past year been recording a downward trajectory in the anticipated election fortunes of the ANC. Most of them expect ANC support to fall below 50%. Adding its voice of doom for the ANC to previous polls, the latest poll of 9,000 respondents by University of the Witwatersrand Professor of Urban Governance David Everatt, conducted for the Change Starts Now movement and just released, gives the ANC only 39% of the vote if elections were held now. If correct, that could open up a Pandora’s box of possibilities that could blow our democracy out of the water, or, on the flip side, celebrate its true coming of age.

Assuming all these polls are correct, and depending on the size of the ANC’s anticipated defeat, it would introduce one of two scenarios: a major loss could see the ANC ousted from power and replaced by a coalition of opposition parties, while a defeat with a smaller margin could see the ANC entering into a governing coalition either with the Democratic Alliance(DA)/ Multi-Party Charter for SA (MPC) on the centre-right, or with the populist/radical extreme left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), or with a host of smaller parties.

It is in this context that South Africa’s young democracy may experience a defining moment as it faces its first real test of maturity. The ANC may gracefully accept defeat and continue either in the opposition benches or as a partner in a coalition government. But even in the latter case there may, speculatively, be another test in store for the future of our democracy, should the ANC partner with the EFF in a coalition.

While the EFF currently is a vigorous participant in our democratic system and institutions, it arguably does so because it has no choice. It is compelled to function within this system by a progressive constitution – one of the best in the world, that is robustly upheld, so far, by the ruling party, opposition parties, the judiciary, and the various political and constitutional institutions. Even dictators like Hitler once first had to work within and through a democratic system before they could fully seize power and abandon their democracy.

Given the EFF’s radical socialist policies, its ambition to nationalise everything of any value, its distinct form of pan-Africanist racial nationalism, its aggressive intolerance towards anyone with whom it disagrees, its militancy and militarist makeup and structures, and the autocratic style of its leader, it may well be an autocratic wolf in democratic sheep’s clothes for now. Should it rise to power alongside the ANC in a coalition, are there any guarantees that it won’t start attacking or even dismantling our democracy from the inside? To date, the likelihood of this happening is very slim as the ANC seems to be resisting the idea of partnering with the EFF.

Note that I pose this purely as a speculative hypothesis of a potential possibility and there is no evidence that the EFF will indeed follow such a path. There is, however, also no distinct evidence that it won’t. But in the same vein, there is another speculative hypothesis that identifies a potentially even bigger risk for democracy in South Africa, based on real, unfolding manifestations but the speculated outcome of which has not yet been proven or materialised. In this case, the ANC may well be the party that selects an undemocratic option.

An uncomfortable question we should be asking

Here we come to the big “what if” … the question we should be asking ourselves before critical elections in a world and country in which democracy is on the retreat and the ruling party is fighting with its back to the wall. Everyone has an opinion on how the ANC is likely to lose power; but no-one is interrogating what the ANC’s response to such a loss of power might be. So, what if the ANC loses the election but refuses to accept defeat? What happens next?

Various leading figures in the ANC have acknowledged that their party may be in trouble come this year’s elections. And all the ANC’s current actions point to this. Unable to show a convincing track record of success, the ANC has embarked on various strategies targeting specific audiences.

It has been radicalising much of its recent policy and legislative content around a reinvigorated embracement of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) focused on socialist economic transformation; it has driven specific legislation and policy initiatives in a populist campaign designed to recapture broad support; and with its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), regardless of what other good intentions and motives it arguably may have had, it sought to deflect attention from its failures and at the same time elevate itself back to the moral high ground on a justice and human rights ticket, a position the ANC last held under Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. In the intervening period the gallery of international rogues and genocidal murderers the ANC chose to befriend or support, spoke for itself.

Are there any signs or evidence that the ANC may refuse to give up power if it loses the elections? There is of course no conclusive, concrete evidence of any such intention and one’s opinion would depend on how one interprets the little blips of concern that have lately appeared on the domestic political radar screen.

Enter the Trump playbook. In the run-ups to both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Trump fostered an advance atmosphere of public distrust and suspicion around his possible election defeat by claiming that if he lost, it would be as a result of election rigging and the election being stolen from him. The dangerous aftermath following his defeat in 2020 around his false “stolen election” campaign is well-known. He desperately sought unconstitutional, undemocratic ways of staying in power.

After South Africa brought its case against Israel at the ICJ, several commentators expressed concern that President Cyril Ramaphosa was delegitimising political activity that did not support the ANC’s position on Israel, painting anyone who did not support the ANC as being supporters of an illegitimate and immoral Israel; and that the ANC was weaponizing the ICJ case in order to cling to power. But one could ask whether Ramaphosa has perhaps gone further than that.

The worrying speck on the radar screen may have come in the form of a warning by Ramaphosa – since repeated – at the end of the ANC’s recent National Executive Committee (NEC) lekgotla and the launch of the ANC’s election campaign, that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel would have domestic political repercussions. According to the SABC, Ramaphosa warned that the ANC was “on high alert for possible attempts of regime change in South Africa by Israel”.  Ramaphosa, reported the SABC, expected a full-blown fightback from the Israelis that may also focus on South Africa’s domestic politics and “our electoral outcomes, in order to pursue a regime-change agenda”. There have been a few more niggly little things in this vein since then.

It may be nothing. Or it may simply be a case of utilising a classic populist propaganda strategy to deflect attention by blaming all ills on a nefarious foreign actor. That has happened before in the ANC. Or could it perhaps be something closer to the Trump model? After all, one could argue that a future dictator already has ample “justification” to discard our constitutional democracy: voters who increasingly prefer delivery results over elections; the youth who increasingly turn their back on our democratic system; and now a nefarious foreign actor who allegedly seeks regime change by undermining the integrity of our elections.

In this dangerous year of many elections amidst retreating global and domestic democracy, with a ruling party in trouble after 30 years of never having been challenged, shouldn’t we at least be asking ourselves: what if the ANC loses but refuses to accept defeat? What then happens next?

Stef Terblanche is a Cape Town-based political analyst and journalist. His opinions are his own and not necessarily those of the DDP.