South African General Election, 2019

[The Free North]

Ok, time for you to go bye bye:

https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1999718/malema-says-jews-are-training-right-wingers-as-snipers-to-kill-black-people/

[The Free North]

I just got back from the country on a 2 week vacation and asked some of my hosts/tour guides about the elections. There were 2 points that stuck out:

1) EFF is going to stay popular amongst younger, urban blacks and will be a political force for some time. I actually had an EFF supporter in Gauteng tell me that older voters were too stupid to understand that the ANC != Mandela right now but because they lived through that era, they will never vote the party out. The new generation doesnt remember the 90s and doesnt care about what the ANC did 20-30 years ago. At least from the people I spoke with, the EFF vote seemed more like an anti-ANC vote than a ideologically motivated one.

2) The DA having an absolute monopoly on the coloured vote in 2014 (and years past) interested me and when I was down in the Western Cape I poked around for a bit more information. Basically, apartheid was kinder to coloureds, speaking Afrikaans is critical too, and one of our coloured guides put it bluntly: "We vote DA because we live in the Western Cape". There has been a lot of resentment on the part of the coloured and white communities with the black 'economic migration' which another coloured voter told me was being used as a tool to flood WC with ANC voters and flip the province. Of course a lot of this is known already, so the one thing I believe could be important for 2019 is the absence of Zuma on the ballot. I didnt speak to a single person who thought Zuma was honest or intelligent but there was plenty of praise for Ramaphosa and i think he could flip some of the coloured vote because he seems to be a far more capable leader so if there is any elasticity around, it might pull voters back to the ANC.


Obviously a lot of this is anecdotal so take it fwiw.


I should also mention I didnt hear a single word about de Lille's new party.

[The Free North]

I went to SA last winter, very excited for this

[The Free North]

Northern Cape has almost 15% of the vote in.  There seems to be a clear swing toward DA based on the results so far.

Still some VF+ precincts out there as well

[The Free North]

So far most of the count are from the Western half of SA which are much more heavy White and Coloured.  I guess we can be sure about ANC performance once some more Eastern SA votes come in.

Yes I was going to note that as well. Lots of votes from more rural WC/NC which is likely skewing the results. Still, it'll be interesting to see if the DA can make any progress in either province. To echo earlier comments, it didnt seem like the DA would be the beneficiary of the ANC decline.

[The Free North]

Saw some twitter numbers, looks like a bad ANC result in Guateng

Which benefits who?

[The Free North]

For my own amusement, I've been looking at precinct results in Cape Town, as it's genuinely one of the most fascinating cities I find

From Blue Downs (relatively mixed new township on the edge of CT)
DA – 70%
ANC – 13%
GOOD – 6.5%
EFF – 2%
VF+ - 0.8%


Blikkiesdorp, Delft of the infamous "temporary relocation camp"
DA - 45%
ANC - 39%
EFF -9%
GOOD - 3.5%

Mitchells Plain Apartheid era coloured township, with a small (but growing) black migrant population
DA - 73%
ANC - 9%
ACDP - 7%
GOOD - 4%
Aljama (cape muslim party) - 2%
EFF - 0.8%
VF+ - 0.2%

Bellville humdrum middle-class once Afrikaans but increasingly mixed northern suburb
DA - 79%
VF+ - 10%
ACDP - 3%
ANC - 3%

Woodstock "mixed" area, now undergoing controversial gentrification
DA - 51%
ANC - 19%
Aljama - 9%
GOOD - 5%
EFF - 5%

Clifton / Camps Bay super rich English speaking (with a big Jewish community) white area - site of protests earlier this year after Black bathers were allegedly thrown off of Clifton beach
DA - 82%
ANC - 10%
ACDP , EFF and VF + all 1% each

Crossroads apartheid era black migrant squatter camp / township
ANC - 83%
EFF - 11%
ATA - 2% (The Alliance for Transformation for All (ATA) is a South African political party founded in 2018 to lobby for the interests of the taxi industry)
DA - 2%

All of these results are pretty much as expected I would assume?

[The Free North]

EFF over 10% seems like a solid bet right now. 70% or so in, 57% ANC, 22% DA...DA looks to end up exactly where they were in 2014, FF+ obviously up on their 2014 numbers slightly.

Basically EFF picks up a little ANC vote, FF+ picks up a little DA vote, no real surprises here.

[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.