Elections: A battle between old foes

The big squeeze has started and South Africa’s political minnows and sprats are being churned into chum.

The most recent poll suggests that at the national level, the 2024 election is emerging as a battle between old foes: the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA).

The likely result will be familiar: a triumphant but damaged ANC facing off against an opposition that consists largely of a faintly revived DA.

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Except for uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party, new parties are unlikely to play anything more than a negligible role in the final power structures, at least this time around.

The coalescing of opposition groups in the Multi-Party Charter (MPC) happened only late last year and may only deliver its full benefits in the 2029 election.

The most recent Brenthurst Foundation/ SABI Strategy voter survey has the ANC at 39%.

This continues a marginal slide from 41% in October 2022 and 44% in November 2022.

The DA is up a tad (four points to 27%) and the MPC – which pools the votes of the DA, Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), ActionSA, Freedom Front Plus and African Christian Democratic Party – down a tad (three points to 33%).

None of this is particularly earth-shattering. What is exciting, though, is the disruption that MK, Jacob Zuma’s late entry, may wreak.

In this survey, MK already registers 13% of the national vote and 25% in KwaZulu-Natal.

At a national level, MK’s entry into the lists has coincided with big drops in support for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the IFP.

The EFF, which in some national polls was challenging the DA, has dropped from 17% to 10%. And the IFP has dropped nationally from seven to two percent nationally.

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It is at a provincial level, in KZN, that the MK most clearly has a knife at the ANC’s throat.

Brenthurst/SABI has the MPC down eight points to 39% in KZN, with the DA share unchanged at 19%, but the IFP dropping nine points from 27% – almost a third – to join it this level. The ANC vote has dropped 12 points – almost four out of 10 of its voters – from 32% to 20%.

The big winner is MK at 25% of the vote and it means that it could become governing party of KZN in coalition with the EFF or the IFP.

The one ray of sunshine for the ANC is in the Western Cape, where it is up almost 50% from 22% in October (13% in the 2022 survey) to 35%.

However, the DA remains in control, at 53% from 56%, with the MPC also down a fraction at 55% (58%). It seems that the ANC’s strongly pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, stance may be paying off in the province that has the highest proportion of Muslim voters, although it hasn’t yet significantly affected the DA vote.

Nationally, on the polling surveys at this stage of the game, it doesn’t look as if the ANC has too much to worry about.

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Unless the MPC gets some kind of boost from unfolding events or more parties and independent candidates take shelter under its umbrella, the ANC can easily retain power by governing in coalition with the EFF.

Conceivably, there may even be a great reconciliation with MK, although that might in turn trigger the exodus of the ANC old guard.

And it is MK that, at this moment, is President Cyril Ramaphosa’s biggest headache.

While MK’s threats of violence, should the Electoral Commission of South Africa rule against its participation, are disgusting, they are the inevitable cost of having a lily-livered president who has never stood up against threats of violence, or actual violence.

In 1994, everyone recognised that the absence of the IFP from that first democratic election would badly taint its legitimacy.

Thirty years on, an ANC-engineered exclusion of MK from the 2024 election would be at least as bad.