There is going to be lots to say about the local government elections, but while the results trickle in, one thing is obvious: it’s been a good week to be blue. In America, the Democrats took both houses of Congress. In South Africa, the Democratic Alliance can contemplate a sentence that, as recently as the last municipal election, would have required a fairly generous lunch to induce anybody to say out loud: it’s nearly as big as the ANC. Who would have ever thunk it?
There is lots to be cautious about in that statement, and the relative size is more to do with the ANC’s decline than the DA’s gain. Yet political analyst Frans Cronje argued recently that South African elections are more predictable than South Africans like to think. For a rough guide to the fortunes of the ANC, just follow living standards. The correlation is extraordinary. In democracy’s first decade, as incomes rose, so did the ANC’s share of the national vote, reaching nearly 70% in 2004. The long stagnation in income per head was accompanied by a long slide in support.
There will be plenty of time to contemplate the ANC’s blues, but for the moment, let’s stick with les Bleus. Beyond the sheer novelty of being within hailing distance of the ANC, the DA has grounds to be pleased about whom it is reaching. A July poll by the Social Research Foundation and The Common Sense put the DA on 13% among black voters and the EFF on 12%. The early votes are seemingly confirming that finding, although obviously a secret ballot will keep its own counsel on the subject. Even so, who would once have imagined that the DA and Julius Malema would be running neck and neck among black South Africans? Meanwhile, predictions that the DA would struggle to clear 50% in its Western Cape heartland look premature. With about half the count in, it had 53.4% of the municipal vote across the province.
Could do better
Then there’s the government of national unity. Generally speaking, junior coalition partners have a well-founded fear that when the government opens a bridge, the senior partner cuts the ribbon, and when the bridge falls down, there’s a joint press conference. Yet the DA has spent more than two years sharing a cabinet with the ANC and has emerged from the experience, on these figures, with a substantially bigger share of the municipal vote. Whatever else the GNU has cost the DA, the usual electoral punishment is proving hard to spot.
Which brings us to the question I’d ask at DA headquarters once the second bottle is empty. Given the state of the economy and the scale of the ANC’s retreat, why didn’t the DA do better? At the time of writing, on a like-for-like count across all municipal ballots, the DA was up 7.8 percentage points on 2021, while the ANC is down 15.4. This is an early number, and when all the votes are counted, the difference will likely be smaller. Using the PR vote, the ANC led the DA by 24.4 percentage points in 2021 and if the CSIR’s model is right, that is likely to come down to around six percentage points.
This is not an insignificant gain, although it is in line with its peak performance in 2016. But it also means the DA’s advance accounts for only about half the ground the ANC has surrendered. MK and ActionSA are among the alternatives, though the returns can’t tell us how any individual changed their vote. What they can tell us is that a great many South Africans are prepared to contemplate life after the ANC, although they have quite different ideas about whom they’d like to spend it with.
