Ramaphosa and Johnson – A tale of two elections

2019 has been a vintage year for watershed elections.

In SA, the ANC – despite a dismal decade of decline – was handed yet another five-year blank cheque. In Britain, the Conservative Party – despite nine years of economic ineffectuality, a failed coalition and a deadlocked minority government – claimed the biggest Tory majority since 1987.

Politicians are the same everywhere. So it is not really surprising that there are parallels between the two elections.

Not the least of these is that the leaders of both winning parties are new at the helm. Cyril Ramaphosa and Boris Johnson had to first win bloody internecine battles for the leadership.

In SA, to an electorate bloodied by rampant corruption, Ramaphosa successfully cast himself as the good knight who could be counted on to slay the dragon of state capture.

In Britain, to an electorate fed up with more than three years of political gridlock, Johnson successfully cast himself as the man who, at a stroke, could end the misery by slashing through the Gordian knot of Brexit.

Both Cyril and Boris triumphed against official oppositions that were ineffectually led by men who replaced tried and tested policies with their personal ideological variations – in the process alienating traditional supporters.

Democratic Alliance leader Mmusi Maimane had ditched old liberal precepts in favour of what he thought would be electorally more popular race-based strategies. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-left socialism turned its back on the social democrat-style policies that had given Labour 13 consecutive years of power between 1997 and 2010.

Neither would survive the crushing reversals. In the case of the DA, it was the first drop in voting share since 1994. In the case of Labour, it was the worst election result since 1935.

But politicians rarely go gently.

Maimane cheered the decision of “racist voters” to vote for the Freedom Front Plus and intimated the DA was better off without them. It was only when an internal review delivered a scathing verdict on his performance that he resigned.

Despite the stinging verdict of the voters, Corbyn insisted that the Labour manifesto had “huge public support”. He would step down, he said, but only after he had guided the party through a “period of reflection”.

In politics, the only consumer guarantee is buyer’s remorse.

Minority voters who rallied to “give Cyril a chance” are finding the supposedly pragmatic Ramaphosa to be unpleasantly hardline on the issues that most worry them: property rights and an untested national health insurance plan.

British voters in awe at Boris’s ability to channel his inner Churchill are likely to find that, while Brexit is now assured, the tumult is just beginning.

For one, the United Kingdom threatens to come apart. In Northern Ireland, the general election has left the unionists in a minority and, with Brexit rewriting borders, the issue of a single Ireland is again stirring its bloody loins.

And the Scottish Nationalists, having argued that leaving Europe would be disastrous for Britain, are now implausibly arguing that leaving Britain will be good for Scotland. Brace yourself for Brexit 2 dressed in tartan.

We truly do get the governments we deserve.

• The Jaundiced Eye column returns on January 11. Follow Saunderson-Meyer on Twitter @TheJaundicedEye

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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