Holding the Centre

Abstract

The 2006 South African local election results confirm the approximately two-thirds support the African National Congress (ANC)-led Alliance — with the Congress of SA Trade Unions (COSATU) and the SA Communist Party (SACP) — received from those who voted in previous elections, a level of support that is also consistently reflected among COSATU members in surveys held during 1994, 1998 and 2004.1 However, the low voter turnout means less than a quarter of all eligible voters voted for the ANC. As tensions between the ANC leadership under Thabo Mbeki and its working class allies mounted, this should ordinarily have presented an opportunity to build a Left alternative among a disgruntled working class majority — except that the basis for such an alternative, organized workers, seem resistant to an independent `working class politics'. Instead, they put all their energies into replacing the Mbeki leadership with that of his deputy, Jacob Zuma. By remaining within the Alliance, are the increasingly outspoken COSATU and SACP leadership being constrained by a relatively conservative union membership, arguably one of the beneficiaries of the democratic transition; or are workers merely responding to signals from a (largely compromised) leadership that `working class hegemony' can only be realized through a `popular-democratic' politics within the Alliance?