Multiparty convention: Only united front can beat the ANC

The multiparty national convention, to be held by the Democratic Alliance and its partners, is an acknowledgment that no single party can win the elections alone against the ANC, according to a political analyst.

The DA and its moonshot pact partners will hold a national convention tomorrow and on Thursday in Kempton Park to seek agreement on how they will go about working together next year.

This is a bid to dethrone the ANC and to make sure the Economic Freedom Fighters do not get into power after next year’s general elections.

Yesterday, DA leader John Steenhuisen said their national convention was not just an anti-ANC project, but also a pro-South African project that tables real solutions to the urgent problem the country is facing.

“We hope to engage civil society with an eye to holding a joint summit between the multiparty pact and civil society organisations. This coming week is shaping up to become one of the most important in the history of opposition politics in our country,” Steenhuisen said.

“The DA is committed to this project of building a multiparty alternative to the ANC and will play our part at the convention to ensure that the multiparty pact emerges with an agreement that offers real hopes and solutions to the problems that our country is facing. At the end of the day, this pact is not for politicians. The pact must be owned by the people of South Africa.”

Political analyst Dr Levy Ndou said the national convention was not a new idea as parties usually get together to try and dethrone the dominant party.

“In the situation where there is a dominant party, the best way to go is for parties to come together to fight against the dominant party,” Ndou said.

“This is also an acknowledgment by our political parties in South Africa that there’s no political party that can win alone against the ANC without other parties.”

He said the national convention was a very delicate situation because when parties came together, party leaders did not like to relinquish their identity.

“When you are a leader of the party, it is not easy to agree to be consumed or dominated by another party. Those are the issues they need to first deal with,” he said.

He said even if the leaders agreed at the national convention, they still needed to be convinced to buy into the idea.

“The possibility is that you may have party leaders joining the moonshot pact while the members or supporters are not interested in the movement.

“If you go as a leader, you might find yourself going to the moonshot pact alone and the followers might decide to join or support other political parties. This is a factor that political parties must look at.”

Ndou added that the DA should be careful of inviting parties that were dying into the pact. “If you invite a party that has two or three seats, what impact will that party make in the pact?”

Another political analyst, Dirk Kotze said the idea was not for parties to form one party, but a cooperation-based understanding that the parties wanted to develop.

“Parties will still maintain their independence and their identity. What they are doing is cooperating to talk about the possibility of a coalition after the election,” Kotze said.

He said it was going to be difficult to predict whether the pact would be able to defeat the ANC as it was not going to depend on what the pact does but on what the ANC does.

Some of the parties have also accused the DA of misleading them and keeping a door open for the possibility of both the ANC and DA working together to form a coalition next year.

Some of the DA’s partners have told it that it needed to publicly declare it will not form any coalition with the ANC after the elections.