Either by boycotting the poll altogether, or by turning to a growing market of opponents — but mainly the former — voters have turned their backs on the ANC, ushering in a new period of even greater uncertainty and instability, but also opportunity.
made a bold statement. If you don’t trust your councillor or you don’t think your municipality is doing a good job, then vote for someone else, was the gist.preposterous claim that the ANC “will rule until Jesus comes”. Yet the faux humility that was the hallmark of the lacklustre ANC campaign that followed didn’t cut it with the electorate.
And he was absolutely right. Just four years later, and it looks as though coalitions will be the defining feature of not just the next five years of local government, following Monday’s fragmented electoral outcome, but of national and provincial politics for the foreseeable future. delivered a double first.
This stretches government legitimacy to breaking point. It means that the burden on political leaders to constitute stable and sustainable coalitions is even greater. Ideally, those coalitions should not just be about securing the necessary 51% combined majority needed to govern, but should attempt to include as many parties as possible, even though this will add to the complexity of both the negotiations and the management of the coalitions.
But even this chink of light in an otherwise dismal scene is fraught with difficulty, not least because voters are being drawn away from the centre ground. The flanks continue to rise. When parties splinter off the ANC or DA and try to adopt central/rational positions they don’t succeed. Noisy populism is more likely to prosper, although EFF leader Julius Malema will be desperately disappointed with his party’s failure to gain any substantial ground.
Germany is a case study in this regard. Its national election was on 26 September. Since then various parties have been testing the water with each other to decide, as a first stage, whether they even want to form a coalition.
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