Coalition Country. Leon Schreiber. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Leon Schreiber
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Социальная психология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780624083955
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The message stuck. Building on its 2009 provincial victory, the DA completely flipped the script in the province’s 30 municipalities, winning 12 outright, while the ANC did not gain a majority in a single municipality. The rout continued in 2016, when the DA won 17 municipalities outright. The ANC again failed to get a single outright majority.

      The Western Cape experience shows that, at the municipal and provincial levels at least, voters who abandon the ANC may indeed vote en masse for a single opposition party. After 2006, Western Cape voters who were dissatisfied with ANC maladministration did not split evenly into different groups supporting the ACDP (which held the position of deputy mayor in Cape Town), the FF+, COPE, the UDM, the Africa Muslim Party, the Universal Party, and the DA, even though these parties were all part of the Cape Town coalition. Instead, the DA was able to take control of the Cape Town narrative and convince voters that it was the real reason for the city’s turnaround. Its glossy 2011 election manifesto was even entitled The Cape Town Story.2 As a result, a large majority of voters rewarded the DA, but none of its six original coalition partners.

      In essence, the DA’s strategy in the Western Cape was first to wrest control of the metro away from the ANC through a coalition; turn Cape Town into a well-run municipality; take credit for the improvement; and then carry that message into the province’s rural hinterland. Tracking the party’s growth between 2006 and 2016 shows a striking pattern: the DA first took over areas closer to Cape Town, while its influence weakened further from the metro. By 2016, this incremental process meant that almost every municipality within about 450 kilometres of Cape Town was under DA control. Beyond 450 kilometres, the ANC remained in charge (although its majorities were shrinking).

      The spread of DA power from the metropolis to the surrounding rural areas probably had a lot to do with information flows. People who lived closer to the city visited Cape Town more regularly, and knew more people who lived there. These visitors took the DA’s story of progress back to their own communities. But it naturally took longer for the DA’s Cape Town message to reach those people who lived further away, knew fewer people in the city, and visited less regularly. The message was widely spread in municipalities close to the city, but thinned out further from Cape Town.

      From a national perspective, this paints a promising picture for the DA. Just as in Cape Town in 2006, the party took over mayoral positions in Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane, and Johannesburg after the 2016 elections by cobbling together multiparty working arrangements. In the hopes of replicating its Western Cape experience, the first step would be for the DA to clean up the administration of these three metros – no small task after decades of ANC misrule.3

      If it does succeed in turning these metros around, the party could build its 2019 provincial and 2021 municipal campaigns around these success stories. Based on the Western Cape template, the DA’s aim would be to take over dozens of municipalities and eventually win provincial office in Gauteng, the Northern Cape, and possibly the Eastern Cape. It is probably the best strategy the DA could follow, and it will be fascinating to watch this dynamic unfold.

      However, it is doubtful whether the party will be able to replicate the Western Cape pattern in most other parts of the country. Western Cape politics have always differed from those in the rest of the country. In 1994, the NP won the Western Cape even as the rest of the country (except for KwaZulu-Natal) supported the ANC. Although the ANC eventually merged with a faction of the NP to gain control of the province, it was never as popular there as it was in most parts of the country. The Western Cape was never fully under the ANC’s spell.

      The reasons for this have to do with economics and demographics. Even before the DA took over, the Western Cape was the second wealthiest province in South Africa (after Gauteng) in terms of GDP per capita, and had the lowest unemployment rate of all nine provinces.4 The province has excellent transport and communication infrastructure, and features the highest literacy and school completion rates in the country.5 Overall, then, residents of the Western Cape are wealthier, more educated, and have access to better infrastructure than most other South Africans.

      The province’s demographics are also different from most of the country (although some parts of the Eastern and Northern Cape have similar demographic profiles). It is the only province where black people are not a demographic majority. Coloured people constitute nearly half of the population, while the province is also home to a higher proportion of white South Africans relative to other regions. Afrikaans is the primary language for half of the Western Cape’s population, as opposed to only 13.5 per cent of the national population.6

      The profile of DA supporters largely reflects the economic and demographic composition of its Western Cape support base. The latest available public opinion poll on the profiles of political party support was conducted by Ipsos in late 2013. While those results are outdated, they provide some interesting insights. The results show that, on average, DA voters were better educated and wealthier than ANC (or EFF) voters. About half of DA voters were white, 27 per cent coloured, and 20 per cent black.7 Afrikaans-speakers made up about half of all DA supporters, and English-speakers about 32 per cent.8

      While it is thus safe to say that the party’s message has resonated with wealthier minority voters to a far greater extent than those of any other party – it has indeed turned the DA into the most ethnically diverse political party in South African history – the big question is whether the DA’s strategy of using the Nelson Mandela Bay/Tshwane/Johannesburg story to win over voters in the rural Eastern Cape as well as in the rural areas of Limpopo, North West, the Free State and Mpumalanga which surround metropolitan Gauteng, could succeed. This strategy worked well in the relatively wealthy, mostly Afrikaans- and English-speaking minority communities of the Western Cape. But it is still unclear whether it will work in regions where most voters are black, don’t speak Afrikaans or English, and are much poorer.

      Nevertheless, the 2016 elections showed that the DA has a much higher electoral ceiling than most people thought possible a decade previously. If it can govern the big cities successfully during the next few years, it may soon be in outright control of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Tshwane, and Johannesburg. Given the ANC’s implosion in the metros, the DA could soon also be the senior partner in a coalition government in Ekurhuleni (which would give the party control over all of Gauteng’s major municipalities), while trending upwards in Buffalo City, eThekwini and Mangaung. Rural regions most likely to swing eventually to the DA are located in the western parts of the Northern and Eastern Cape, home to some minority groups that still support the ANC. Proof of this is the fact that the DA has also grown significantly in many smaller regional centres such as Kimberley, Springbok, and Cradock.

      The best-case scenario for the DA during the next decade is to retain its majorities in Cape Town and the Western Cape, win control of Gauteng’s municipalities as well as its provincial government, win Nelson Mandela Bay outright, and win provincial elections in the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape. If this does materialise, it would constitute a political achievement that was unthinkable even two elections ago. But even then, DA majorities in much of the central and eastern parts of the country – including Limpopo, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, North West, and the Free State – would remain highly unlikely.

      While the DA’s best-case scenario is not impossible, economic and demographic realities mean that its future gains in Gauteng as well as in the Northern and Eastern Cape will probably result from its participation in coalitions. A more realistic future for the DA is probably one in which the party remains dominant in the Western Cape, and heads coalition governments (at the municipal and provincial levels) in Gauteng, the Northern Cape, and parts of the Eastern Cape. Despite the DA’s impressive recent gains, it remains highly unlikely that it will gain outright control of more than half of South Africa’s municipalities and provinces within the next decade. In turn, this means the party is unlikely to get more than 50 per cent of the national vote in the near future.

      Rise of the spoilers

      A compounding challenge facing the DA’s attempts to gain majority support among poorer black communities in the central and eastern parts of the country is the emergence of the EFF as a spoiler or kingmaker in some significant municipalities. Although the EFF gained only 8.24 per cent of the national vote in the 2016 municipal elections, and did not win a majority in even one municipality, it probably played a decisive role