Party disintegrations & re‐alignments in post‐apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In June 2000, at a scenic game park near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, a group of academics, journalists and politicians got together under the auspices of the Politics department at Rhodes University to discuss the fate of and the prospects for opposition politics in post apartheid South Africa. In the midst of the two-day conference, word came through that the Democratic Party (DP) and New National Party (NNP) had just cemented a pact and established the Democratic Alliance (DA) under whose banner they would canvass in the 2000 local government elections. Given the theme of the conference, this development tended to dominate the discourse with two views predominating. On the one hand, there were those who were positive about the development, not necessarily because they supported the politics of the new party, but more so because they felt it enhanced the prospects for serious political opposition, which, it was hoped, would have the effect of checking the drift to a one party dominant political system in South Africa (Giliomee, Myburgh & Schlemmer, 2001). On the other hand, there were a number of academics and political commentators who were concerned with the unprincipled nature of the alliance, and warned that the new party would soon collapse as it was held together by nothing more than an anti-ANC electoral pact, confined to support among minority racial groups (Maloka, 2001; Habib & Taylor, 2001). The political honeymoon between the DP and NNP went on for two years. In the local government elections, the DA performed better than either its two individual components had in the 1999 general elections, although its share of the electoral vote was lower than the 20 percent received by the NNP in 1994. Moreover, the new alliance was unable to make significant inroads into the African areas, although it did retain significant support in the lower middle and working class communities of the Coloured and Indian population. But the jewel in the crown of the DA was its control of the Western Cape. Although the African National Congress (ANC) received the largest number of electoral votes in the province, the alliance between the DP and NNP enabled the latter to keep the former out of power. Moreover, the DA took control of Cape Town, the most prominent city in the Western Cape, and the site of the country's national legislature. The DP's Tony Leon and the NNP's Martinus van Schalkwyk, leader and deputy-leader of the DA respectively, hoped to use the Western Cape as the basis of a national electoral challenge by show-casing the province as a model of good governance.