THE LOWLY NEWSPAPERMAN: When big parties fail, SA has smaller options — and it’s not a wasted vote

The answers to our challenges may not lie in the big parties, so we should allow voters to explore options, no matter the size. And when smaller parties tilt the balance of power, South Africa is healthier for it.

This week the alarm was being sounded about the performance of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in state elections in the east of that country. Barely 13 years since its formation, the populist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and homophobic AfD secured nearly 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. A rout had been predicted but not even the most optimistic AfD leaders or the most pessimistic outlook from the mainstream Christian Democratic Union and Social Democratic Party saw that coming.

It was the same in Britain a few months ago when the equally obnoxious Reform UK trumped the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives. Current polling indicates that if an election were held today the party, which has just a handful of MPs, would be in pole position to form a government. The Tories, once the standard bearer of conservative opinion, would be reduced to a distant third. After decades on the margins, France’s National Front is now within reach of the presidency and leading the largest bloc in parliament.

Yet, here at home there is this persistent argument that small parties are an irritant and that voting for them is like throwing your precious vote into a giant landfill where it will disappear into the rubbish and gunge.

This narrative has been perpetuated by both the ANC and the DA. It suited both. When the ANC was still the majority party it feared that tiny parties would gnaw at its vote share and give its opponents leverage that they did not deserve. So the ANC preached to its traditional support base that the only way their vote would be useful would be to vote for the party currently in government since only it could effect the improvements in their lives and in their communities.

For its part, the DA believed that “fragmentation” in opposition ranks was slowing down its project of building a viable alternative to the ANC. So it argued in favour of voting for a consolidation of opposition forces, shorthand for all smaller players coalescing around itself.

Both parties’ perspectives (and the view of many political observers) was that South Africa’s democracy would follow the pattern of those countries with two dominant parties, with single players picking up the bits. To them the choice was supposed to be between the left-of-centre former liberation movement and the centre-right self-proclaimed custodian of liberalism.

Race mattered immensely in this equation as the ANC played up the DA’s milky complexion and the latter sought to project itself as the most diverse political force in the country and draw from the black, green and gold party’s base.

Several splinters over the years, the emergence of smaller players as well as disengagement from formal politics has seen the ANC cut down from a party wielding a comfortable majority of more than 60% to one that sits at 40% and is in decline.