By: Steven Friedman
PARTY politics in South Africa’s democracy has changed, possibly forever. But it will take a while before politicians, media and commentators catch up with this.
May’s national election was not only the first in the country’s democratic history in which no party achieved a majority. It may well have begun a new era in which no party ever again gains a majority.
Elections in this country since 1994 have been highly unusual – it is virtually unheard of for any party in multi-party democracies to win over half the votes. It never happens at all in other countries which use proportional representation. Parties can win seats with a very small share of the vote, so politicians and voters can stay away from bigger parties and still play a role in parliamentary politics. In countries which use this system, it is rare for the biggest party to win 30%, let alone a majority.
It seems highly unlikely that the African National Congress will ever again achieve a majority. While its decline at the polls is a product of general voter disaffection, the trigger which cost it its majority was a breakaway – the MK Party. This continued a trend: over the last decade and a half, the ANC’s support has declined because breakaways scooped up a chunk of its vote.
So, politicians know now that it is possible to break away from the ANC and still play a role in politics – two parties which come out of the ANC occupy almost a quarter of the seats in parliament. In future, ANC politicians who are unhappy with the leadership will join or form another party. The factional battles which divided the ANC over the past couple of decades will become a contest between parties.
Given this, it is hard to see how the ANC could ever again assemble an alliance which would give it more than half the vote. Or how any other party could do that because politicians can leave parties with whose leaders they disagree and still win elected office.
Living With Coalitions
Of course, if parties are not going to win majorities any longer, the country will be governed by coalitions, which is how all other countries which use proportional representation are governed. Parties may hold onto majorities in some provinces and municipalities but even that may become the exception – only half the provinces and a couple of metropolitan councils still have single party governments and we can expect the number to decline.
As South Africans are finding out, coalitions are not an option parties choose – they emerge because there is no other option . And so coalitions are about convenience and power.
Parties choose coalitions which they believe will enable them to govern without losing their support base. The choice has nothing to do with deep love for the other party and parties who thoroughly dislike each other and campaign loudly against each other can govern together.
The seats in government which parties are offered depends on their power, not on the sort of formula for fairness we would expect in a constitution. Numbers do matter because the coalition needs a majority. But, as we have seen in some local governments, smaller parties can wield far more power than their numbers warrant if the coalition needs them to stay in power.
Because coalitions are about building a majority, a party which wins the largest share of the vote – but less than a majority – is not entitled to govern unless it can create a majority by getting together with other parties.
Where coalitions turn out to be impossible because no-one can cobble together a majority, the new reality could also produce minority governments. Because governments only fall if they lose no confidence votes or they cannot pass a budget, parties can govern without a majority as long as they avoid both pitfalls. This may mean that a party outside the government agrees not to topple it in exchange for concessions – Johannesburg was governed this way for a time when the EFF agreed not to support the removal of a DA-led coalition.
The new reality may sound messy, but it creates opportunities for influence for citizens who would otherwise stay on the margins. If the party which speaks for you can win, say, 10% of the vote, it can end up in government with a say over important decisions. So, it should become more possible to use party politics to get what people want from government.
Misunderstanding Reality
All these realities are now part of this country’s democratic reality. But very little of this, it seems, has sunk in.
First, coalitions are still seen more as a swear word than a reality. They are labelled as unruly, chaotic and a bar to effective government, even though no-one has ever shown that coalitions offer voters worse service. There are constant calls to roll back democracy to control coalitions and a bill has been drafted which does that.
This bias may be part of the reason why the claim that the new administration is a Government of National Unity (GNU) is believed by many politicians and most of the public debate. The government has none of the features of a GNU – it does not unite parties across the spectrum to deal with a national crisis. It was formed because no party achieved a majority, which is not a national crisis.
It is called a GNU because the leadership of the largest party, the ANC, was worried about resistance in its ranks to a coalition with the DA. They thought it would be easier to ‘sell’ this if the coalition was dressed up as a GNU by including small parties even though their support does not warrant seats in government and they are not needed to keep the coalition in power.
Why is so obvious a ploy widely believed? Because most of the debate does not like coalitions and is still convinced that only a government run by one big party is legitimate. A pretend GNU is comforting because it can seem like government by one big party even though it is not.
The debate also finds it very difficult to accept that coalitions are about political reality and about power. Some voices even have a problem with simple arithmetic. When MK could not assemble a coalition to govern KwaZulu Natal, the other parties were blamed for ignoring the majority. But MK did not win a majority – it won around 45%. The majority voted for the four parties in the coalition. So the provincial government was elected by the majority – as were some local governments in which the ANC landed up in opposition even though it was the biggest party.
Beyond this, a common reaction to some negotiations since the election is to assume that there is a clear standard for who should form a coalition with whom and how parties should be represented. There isn’t – as the current Gauteng government shows. Negotiations between the ANC and DA deadlocked when they could not agree on how many government seats the DA should fill. The ANC then formed a minority government. It could obviously be voted out but may be around for a long time because the DA knows that, if it votes with other parties to remove the provincial government, it opens the way for the EFF or MK to join the province’s government, which it told voters it would do everything it can to avoid.
All this has been greeted with outrage because the DA, which received only seven percentage points less than the ANC in the province’s election, is excluded and was not offered seats in its governments in proportion to its share of the vote. But the current government is entitled to govern as long most members of the province’s legislature don’t vote them out. And its leaders are entitled to take advantage of openings presented by the fact that the DA won’t vote or govern with other parties outside the provincial coalition.
This failure to understand the new reality is a problem not only because it prompts ill-informed comment and misplaced moralising – although it does that too. The real problem is that, if people do not understand how political reality works, they cannot use it to claim their citizenship rights.
As long as all key political actors continue to treat government by one big party as normal and natural – even though it no longer exists –people will lose opportunities to use the new reality to make democracy work for them. It is still common, for example, to treat the biggest party in a minority government or coalition as though it won two-thirds of the vote and so to complain endlessly about it rather than influencing it.
Only those who understand the new reality will be able to make it work for them. Which is an obvious reason for those who take part in the national debate to recognise that politics has changed and to work out how to make the new world work for them.
Prof Steven Friedman is a research professor at the University of Johannesburg, faculty of humanities, politics department, and writes in his personal capacity.