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People from District 37 in Soshanguve voted in a by-election in September 2018 in Tshwane, South Africa. (Photo by Gallo Images / Alet Pretorius)
Super Wednesday was a cause for celebration for the ANC and a reason for further soul-searching for the DA.
First published in Daily Maverick 168
More than 73% of the districts at stake in South Africa’s Super Wednesday by-elections were handily won by the ANC, a reminder that Africa’s oldest liberation movement continues to enjoy electoral success that would be the envy of any party. political anywhere in the country. world.
Analysts had speculated that voters could punish the ANC for the punitive economic blockade of Covid-19 and the corruption that surrounded the pandemic-related acquisitions, but there was little sign of that momentum at the polls. The ruling party won six new districts, retained 64 and lost just two, one to the IFP in Nkandla, prompting some chanting from the IFP.
The new districts won by the ANC were, with the exception of one drawn from the apparently defunct National Freedom Party, captured at the expense of the DA. Media headlines stemming from Super Wednesday, the largest number of by-elections held on a single day in South African history, have focused on the painful losses suffered by the district attorney. But the ANC’s triumph is arguably more revealing.
Local elections have seen the ANC underperform in recent years, for good reason. It is in these surveys at the municipal level that rubber must hit the streets in terms of service provision, an area where the deficiencies of the ruling party are well recorded. However, voters have responded with forgiveness to the ANC in this regard this time.
Supporters of President Cyril Ramaphosa may well point to these polls as evidence that Ramaphoria continues to produce an electoral coup for the ANC. From that perspective, the results of the by-elections can help strengthen Ramaphosa’s hand as he enters the hard-hitting meetings of Congress over the next year.
At DA headquarters, a game attempt was made to spin the results as a cause for celebration. “We are very pleased to have retained most of our districts, shown growth in some of them and even gained two new districts in a period when we are busy consolidating and stabilizing internal systems and processes,” the party said.
But the numbers speak for themselves: the district attorney lost a third of his wards on Super Wednesday, retaining 14, losing nine and winning two. The party attributed this attrition in part to its “democratically mature voters who punish us where we have let them down,” a slightly Trumpian interpretation of the facts (“I have the best voters, the most democratically mature voters, even when they don’t vote for me.” ). The district attorney also pointed to “the phenomenon of identity politics,” without further explanation.
On Facebook, the president of the party’s federal council, Helen Zille, also blamed the growth of “small ethnic parties”: a possible reference to the loss by the prosecutor of a Johannesburg neighborhood (Lenasia) to the Muslim party Al Jama-ah . It is unclear if Zille considers ex-con Gayton McKenzie’s Patriotic Alliance to be an “ethnic party” as well, but one of the biggest upsets of the day was the defeat of the Patriotic Alliance in District 68 (Riverlea-Pennyville) in Johannesburg. with the DA collapsing from 46% to 14%.
The poaching of DA voters by Freedom Front Plus continued in the North West province, where the victory of FF Plus of a Potchefstroom neighborhood over the DA marks the fourth DA neighborhood that FF Plus has claimed in the province. By winning that district, the FF Plus increased its support by more than 41% since its presentation in 2016, suggesting that the threat to the DA posed by the party among white Afrikaans voters in particular is very real.
What should also be giving the DA strategists sleepless nights is Patricia de Lille’s GOOD party foray into the Western Cape, and particularly on the Garden Route. In George, GOOD saw his first elected ward councilman after defeating the district attorney in Pacaltsdorp. GOOD’s Brett Herron noted in a statement: “After winning just 3% of the vote in George in the 2019 election, GOOD has now become the second largest party in all contested districts.”
Although the country’s second-largest opposition party achieved growth in Johannesburg, Mpumalanga and the Northern Cape in particular, the EFF was unable to turn its noise into district victories.
But another conclusion of the Super Wednesday should make all political parties reflect. Although the Electoral Commission declared itself happy with the average turnout (37.83%), turnout decreased in almost all by-elections.
By-elections traditionally struggle to attract voters in national poll numbers, and Covid-19 is an additional deterrent. However, it is clear that despite the great media attention ahead of these elections, the appetite for voting among many South Africans simply does not exist at this time. DM168
