Over the past few years, a significant number of new political parties have formed. They include Action SA (founded in 2020), Arise SA (2023), the Cape Coloured Congress (2020), Rise Mzansi (2023) and Xiluva (2023).
Many of them have as foundational to their rationale a countenance to voter apathy. They blame an unaccountable democratic system and venal, distant politicians as the two most powerful contributing factors in this regard. In turn, they offer a new politics: an approach that is based on “grassroots activism” and people-centred policy, designed to reinvigorate the electorate and bring those who have opted out back into the fray. They are sick of the politics of politics.
It's nothing new. A great many new parties have come and gone, with the same offer at their heart. Inevitably more contemporary issues, or internal politics, determines their fate, and it takes no time at all for them to be assigned a position on the ideological spectrum, whatever the “nonpolitical” pretence.
This is all good and necessary as voter apathy is a profound problem, but it is also a baseline test for these parties and, if history is anything to go by, a commitment none of them will be held to, come Election Day.
In other words, the one sum political analysts and commentators never do is an assessment of how these new political parties and this new politics actually affect voter turnout. Do they drive up turnout, or not? And if not, why?
A good case study in this regard is Mmusi Maimane’s contradictory collective of individuals: One SA for All (Bosa). Across the 12 municipalities where Bosa-backed candidates stood in the 2021 local government elections, turnout was an abysmal 47% and Bosa candidates averaged 4.2% of the vote.
Maimane had said before that election, “There are many political parties in this country and the majority of the people don’t bother showing up to vote because they’re not inspired by the list of available options.” But he failed to provide any new inspiration. In turn, that failure had zero impact on his cause or reputation. He was never asked, by anyone, why his new politics had failed to produce a new attitude.
A great many of those political parties recently formed have made the same case. They are the cure. Importantly, when it comes to the disease, they are often careful to never blame the voters themselves.
Voters are the victims, the story goes, of a lack of meaningful engagement. They are deprived of meaningful options, suffer poor or uninspiring leadership, have weak policy choices and are disillusioned by ubiquitous corruption and incompetence. Perhaps. Just as true, however, is that SA voters are both apathetic and pathetic.
But that is something no-one really wants to say, certainly not political parties, and definitely not new political parties. Voters are, to these organisations — as they are to every political party — a constituency to be pandered to, not criticised. The fourth estate too, plays this game.
You can be sure our many and various problems contribute significantly to the grand sense of alienation that pervades the country. But is that enough to justify opting out? That depends on your attitude to the consequences. If that attitude is: let the chips fall where they may, then you are complicit in the decay, not exempt from it.
The assumption underpinning all this is that there is some ideal political party that exists out there in the public imagination. A party of pure goodness, led by the virtuous, founded on some universal truth and fuelled by charisma. It doesn’t exist in the real world, and never will. Regardless, most of these new parties lay claim to that throne.
That is another great myth of new political parties — that they will occupy the middle ground, and bring together all-comers. In this sense, they offer an anti-choice: the best of all worlds. They believe the silent majority constitutes a swath of rationalists, waiting for a grand compromise. There is no evidence to support this. In truth, they are mostly likely talking about a silent minority.
They will all very quickly discover the real universal political truth: that by coming into existence, you create division, not unity. People forget that when Barack Obama was elected on the back of a record number of democratic votes in 2008, his opponent, John McCain, lost on a record number of conservative votes. Even the most charismatic leaders produce, as a by-product of their appeal, inspiration in another direction. This why you must stand for something (and against something else) in politics.
The epitome of this narrative is “the youth”. How this constituency is championed and celebrated as the last bastion of hope. The old politics of the ANC is experienced as antiquated; the new politics as too alien. It is endlessly bemoaned that they lack choice and leadership. They return all this misplaced understanding, in election after election, with brutal uninterest. No choice is good enough; no compromise too palatable. The youth are not the epitome of hope, they are the embodiment of irresponsibility.
Another grand assumption is that the average alienated voter has carefully weighed the options and made an informed decision not to vote. That would perhaps be understandable, but is it true? To what extent do voters want their party of choice or a leader to change, as opposed a new choice altogether? We just assume the latter. Perhaps many of those people have not opted out nor changed their vote, and are simply waiting to put their mark back at the only place they feel it belongs?
Something needs to be said to the SA electorate. There is no such thing as the perfect political party or leader. Choice is a messy business. People need to reconcile themselves to this. But that will only happen if we have a meaningful discussion about the problem, instead of pretending it is something otherwise.
Unfortunately, these new political parties, despite their positioning, will exacerbate the problem — by pandering to imagined ideals — rather than addressing real-world choices. They reinforce the SA voter’s victim mentality. And, surprise, surprise, they will have no real effect on voter apathy regardless.
There are many grand lies that belie SA politics. We pretend we are a functioning democracy. We are not. Certainly we have yet to pass the ultimate democratic test: a change of national government. We are, at best, an aspiring democracy. Above all else, we pretend voters are not largely to blame for our predicament. The problem is not that voters don’t have a choice, it is that they refuse to make one. There was a time this was understandable, but 30 years is too long a period to still be pretending that people are without real agency.
You cannot appeal to people who don’t want to make a choice. You can only appeal to those who do. We can’t tell the difference in SA, and we don’t want to. Choice is divisive: choice involves compromise and is inevitably unsatisfying on some level. Choice is a risk, but you simply must make one for the system to work.
We are about to enter the great age of the anti-choice, between unrealistic ideals and unrealistic expectations. The winner will be the party whose voters understand they need to make a choice. The losers will be those parties that believe most people are waiting to make the right one.
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