South African General Election, 2019

[parochial boy]

Looking at some Durban precincts now -

In Umhlanga very upmarket white coastal suburb, where I had the most hillariously racist experience of my life
DA - 76%
AND - 15%
VF+ - 3%

Phoenix former Indian township north of the city
DA - 69%
Democratic Liberal Congress (Minority Front splinter party) - 13%
ANC - 9%
Minority Front - 5%

Chatsworth Indian township to the south
DA - 78%
ANC - 14%
MF - 4%

Durban Point "don't go there at night! you'll get raped and murdered! and then they'll probably rape your dead body! and murder it again for good measure!"
ANC - 43%
DA - 30%
EFF - 15%

The bit of the Golden Mile beach front where I spent 3 months a couple of years ago
ANC - 56%
DA - 18%
EFF - 17%

The CDB, like Hillbrow in Jo'burg, a good example of a formerly "white" are that degraded quite rapidly after the end of apartheid (it's nowhere near as bad as Hillbrow though). Now has quite a young population, so a good example of how urban "born free" black people re voting
ANC - 61%
EFF - 23%
DA - 8%

[jaichind]

Linear projection of vote share would be (not much change from before)

ANC   57.2%
DA     21.1%
EFF    10.5%
IPF      3.5%
VF+    2.5%

[Frodo]

At the rate at which the ANC is gradually losing support (~5% every five years), it can perhaps win one more general election (in 2024) after this, and then with barely over 50% of the vote.  

[BundouYMB]

At the rate at which the ANC is gradually losing support (~5% every five years), it can perhaps win one more general election (in 2024) after this, and then with barely over 50% of the vote.  

That's not how elections work though. Patterns like this break all the time. I could show you plenty of examples where parties lost votes steadily for several elections in a row before suddenly reversing the trend and gaining votes. The ANC's future isn't predetermined.

[Frodo]

At the rate at which the ANC is gradually losing support (~5% every five years), it can perhaps win one more general election (in 2024) after this, and then with barely over 50% of the vote.  

That's not how elections work though. Patterns like this break all the time. I could show you plenty of examples where parties lost votes steadily for several elections in a row before suddenly reversing the trend and gaining votes. The ANC's future isn't predetermined.

It is if they don't change course. 

[Former President tack50]

On another note, ANC+EFF got above the 2/3 threshold, so I guess land grabs will happen no matter what now.

[Polkergeist]

The general view of the South African politics from the outside is when the ANC is going to lose office.

However when the two main opposition parties get along like this, I don't see the ANC losing office anytime soon.

https://youtu.be/jwO6DH5JiXU?t=313

I guess the question should be who will the ANC go into coalition with, if they fall below 50% nationally in the future.

[Simfan34]

EFF seems like a much more natural partner (after all, it is more or less a splinter group), indeed Malema has suggested he's open to the idea at the provincial level. They'd mesh fairly well with the ANC's more radical, redistributivist left-wing. A ANC-DA coalition is more or less impossible, unless, I suppose, the radicals moved en masse towards the EFF or another left-wing party and a coalition of "moderates" was needed to keep them out. But that is quite implausible.

[jaichind]

The general view of the South African politics from the outside is when the ANC is going to lose office.

However when the two main opposition parties get along like this, I don't see the ANC losing office anytime soon.

https://youtu.be/jwO6DH5JiXU?t=313

I guess the question should be who will the ANC go into coalition with, if they fall below 50% nationally in the future.

Or ANC changes the election system to FPTP.

[parochial boy]

Oh whatever, here is my take. Basically, for all three of the parties it's a pretty disspointing result, that leaves questions to be asked a so on.

With the ANC, Ramaphosa had set himself a target of 60% in order to get his mandate to "clean the party" after all the state capture and corruption scandals of the Zuma years - as that score would have been seen as a victory and popular support for the "liberal" wing of the ANC. Instead, he fell well short of the target and led the ANC to their worst ever result.

However, 57.5% is an improvement over the 2016 municipals, which were themselves actually before the nadir of the Zuma era towards the end of 2017. So in that respect, he has won back a degree of support that the ANC had lost a couple of years ago. All in all, no-one really wins the factional battle, which is going to define the next 5 years; and probably means contined slow decline for the ANC (slow principally as there is still no viable second party for people to go to - so they will continue to go all over the place as they did this year).

Fitting into this, the EFF progressed - but actually less than expected; certainly not in line with the "government in waiting" proclamations that Malema has made. If, and this is a big if, there was actually the sort of mass popular support for the Zuma-Malema populist black nationalism, then you would have expected them to do better. As in, you would have expected them to pull a bigger chunk of disillusioned voters away from the ANC. Add in BLFL's hillarious disaster result and the conclusion is that most black people vote for material reasons - that the modest gains that many have seen under the ANC are far more important than the fundamentally more emotional topics poffered by Malema.

The DA also did badly, which was to be expected in the light of their own internal scandals, mismanagement and the huge factional battle between the "purist" liberals and the more left-leaning types (read, between people who want to pretend apartheid never happened, and people who think it might still be vaguely relevant in understanding modern SA). Basically, Maimane's softish line on social and economic questions (and his skin colour, lets be honest), compared to say Zille's rabid Thatcherism and clear alignment on certain, um, "racial" questions appears to have alienated a lot of white voters, who went to VF+ - while not winning over black ones (they're still only getting 2% in the townships...).

Add to that, the drop in support among Coloured voters should be worrying them; as Coloureds now make up the single biggest chunk of their support - and yet in terms of leadership and political priorities, the DA are still very much a white party. At the moment, Coloureds vote DA more or less because they think that the ANC is only cares black people - but why should they carry on voting for a party that very clearly doesn't care about the issues that they face?

The general view of the South African politics from the outside is when the ANC is going to lose office.

However when the two main opposition parties get along like this, I don't see the ANC losing office anytime soon.

https://youtu.be/jwO6DH5JiXU?t=313

I guess the question should be who will the ANC go into coalition with, if they fall below 50% nationally in the future.

Or ANC changes the election system to FPTP.

Which would have less of an impact than you might expect. The defining sort of thing in South Africa's social history has had the side effect that the voters of different parties live in completely different areas. FPTP might hurt EFF, but it would benefit the DA, especially in urban areas and the Western/Northern Cape.

[RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm]

The general view of the South African politics from the outside is when the ANC is going to lose office.

However when the two main opposition parties get along like this, I don't see the ANC losing office anytime soon.

https://youtu.be/jwO6DH5JiXU?t=313

I guess the question should be who will the ANC go into coalition with, if they fall below 50% nationally in the future.

Or ANC changes the election system to FPTP.

Which would have less of an impact than you might expect. The defining sort of thing in South Africa's social history has had the side effect that the voters of different parties live in completely different areas. FPTP might hurt EFF, but it would benefit the DA, especially in urban areas and the Western/Northern Cape.

See 1948.

TL;DR: The predecessor to the National Party got nearly a majority of seats despite getting 11% less of the popular vote than the United Party thanks to FPTP and rural seats having fewer voters per seat. The National Party’s coalition with the Afrikaner Party and their collective majority of seats from the 1948 election led to the establishment of the apartheid state that lasted until the early 90’s.

[DC Al Fine]

What happened to that Inkatha Freedom splinter? They seem to have disappeared and the IFP vaccumed up their votes.

[xelas81]

What happened to that Inkatha Freedom splinter? They seem to have disappeared and the IFP vaccumed up their votes.

National Freedom Party is the splinter party. They still managed to win 2 seats.
If you add IFP + NFP together, they won the same amount of seats in 2019 (IFP 14, NFP 2) as in 2014 (IFP 10, NFP 6).

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What happened to that Inkatha Freedom splinter? They seem to have disappeared and the IFP vaccumed up their votes.

the party leader had a stroke in 2014 and has been out of the public eye ever since (despite technically having a deputy ministerial position in the Zuma and Ramaphosa governments, for whatever reason); they didn't even manage to contest the 2016 local elections for lack of funding.

It's basically a similar reason to why COPE faded way tbh: a personality/factional split that briefly held people's attention but is long considered irrelevant by the public at large.

[The Free North]

There really isnt anywhere for the colored vote to go. They're too linguistically and racially distinct from the black population to really back the ANC or EFF (barring some sort of ideological purism drawing them to the later). I don't think you can forget the regional aspect of the vote as well. When I was in Cape Town last winter we had a tour guide who was colored and I asked her why her community voted so strongly for the DA and her response was essentially "We're from the Western Cape, thats what we do".

Furthermore, perhaps they feel they'll be drowned out under an ANC government? I can't really speak to what the ANC outreach to the colored community is like, but the sense I got from my time in the WC was that there was a general 'othering' by both whites and coloreds about people from other provinces (read: blacks) which created a tacit political alliance, strengthened linguistically, to govern as they collectively see fit. I saw fair bits of intermingling between coloreds and whites in the outlying areas of Cape Town, whereas blacks were almost always separate. I really cant underscore how much the Afrikaans thing factors in as well.   

Frankly, it remains one of the more curious things in modern politics, and i'm not fully satisfied with my understanding of the whole situation at this point.

[RFK Jr.’s Brain Worm]

Can Ramaphosa be re-elected in 2024? I know he’s already served about a year.

[StateBoiler]

[StateBoiler]

Rugby board I'm on which has a good bit of South Africans, they're mostly DA supporters in the past, and a good number are disillusioned with where DA have went policy-wise.

http://forum.planetrugby.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=88680

I’m not convinced that the DA bleeding support to the FF+ is a bad thing.

One thing that has hamstrung the DA’s election efforts over the last 10-15 years has been that many of the NP and NNP nationalist voters came over the DA. This gave the ANC and EFF a cudgel to beat them with.

One of the better out outcomes would be for more white, conservative and right-leaning voters to find a permanent home in the FF+ and then the DA might become more appealing to black voters. Eventually they might then be able to form a coalition; with the FF+ playing kingmaker and tempering some of the DA’s stupider policy positions.

So yeah; I see a silver lining there actually.

Still very disappointed in the ANC and EFF’s good showings though. Maybe time to dust off my CV again.

You're making some assumptions here.

The first is that it's only Afrikaners, or that if the FF+ got some scale behind them they would confine themselves to that. When all their own leaders have not been saying that for a very long time, their manifesto launch had more coloured speakers than white ones I'm pretty sure. If the DA loses 2 million votes, they're holed below the waterline, there's no recovery from that. So the danger here is, you're sorta relying on the FF+ to be nasty bastards or something (?), when they already don't behave like that.

The second is that this would win the DA black votes. The first problem is you would have to highlight it, which means calling those that voted FF+ racist, which means probably losing more to the FF+. But the main problem with this, is it was always wrong that the DA could somehow rebrand itself and ANC voters would accept it. Politics is like religion in SA, you're either part of the ANC church or not, and only the ANC can decide if you are or not. It will never allow the DA entry. There's been plenty of parties that were decent enough, and had no white people involved at all really, they weren't in the ANC church and got nowhere.

The reality is this. The ANC and EFF combined are at about 70%, which isn't much change from where the ANC alone was in the mid 00s. Only a culture change will shift that, which could come suddenly in any election, or take a long time. Until then any opponent is really only in a fight for survival against the others in the remaining 30%.

I agree completely.

I’m not saying it will be true, only that the DA’s best play going forward will be to play to the perception that it is. They need a boogeyman that is more to the right, or just perceived to be more to the right. Another party with a significant set of voters that will grant them plausible deniability when the next race-based scandal breaks out.

It’s a chickensh**t strategy, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I’ll take anything that will unseat the ANC and cut off their access to state funds.

Only straight down the middle non-racialism, and refusal to support any race based laws is going to work. It's the only way to keep a multi racial/language/ethnic party like the DA together. Only way to build any cross community trust.

If they attempt some dodgy divide and rule trick, they're locking in losing more votes before they even start. If they try doing that and fail, it's then sort of hard to reload and do the opposite. Politics is about the long game and trust, especially in SA. The DA actually lost a small amount to the FF+ in 2014, but it wasn't spoken about much. They've lost a lot more this time wherever the total ends up. You can be sure there's more potential losses if they get this wrong.

I guess the big danger is a split in the party (although part of me would welcome that). It's all held together by winning. If people can see those lost votes would be big enough to start a party with had they split, it will become tempting if the party isn't winning for long enough.

This is a lot like the rust belt voters who voted for Obama twice, then voted for Trump once, and were called racists isn't it? Good luck winning those voters back with that tactic, or keeping their friends and family on your side.

It's just a retarded nailed certainty, to double up the loses next time.

Which is why I suspect it's something close to what the DA will do.

So you would vote FF+? Or tell me why you did not?

Voting is secret in SA. :roll:

It's obvious to me why Afrikaans speakers were more likely to vote FF+, and why English speakers were more likely to vote DA. You wouldn't have bothered asking your question if you understood this. For English speakers liberal political parties PFP/DP/DA have tribal attachment, that level of loyalty means you put up with more. You vote for it, like an ANC voter does, even if it's a pile of sh**t. Afrikaans speakers do not have this attachment. The chances of an English speaker from KZN not voting DA, is remote. The chances of such a person staying quiet and repeating a load of rubbish that's bad for the DA, is also remote.

If the DA starts coming out with this "it's the RACISTS!!" as an explanation, then they're going to lose more next time. It also doesn't work if it's just wrong, they've had growing coloured support in the WC and NC for awhile now, their WC premier candidate was coloured (the DA's was white). I would rather not see the FF+ on 1 million, they're going to be near enough halfway to that by the end of this election. Once a party has that sort of size, it creates its own momentum that isn't dictated by opponents.

If the DA adopts the position you're taking. They're going to have a worse result in 2024. Going on some witch hunt and smearing people, just means the places the DA lost half its vote this time lose the other half next time.

[Lechasseur]

Given the DA's losses, will there be any changes in the DA?