Fantasy of a nonparty president is a result of depression
A new bout of magical thinking is doing the rounds in parts of SA. The short version of the story is that the introduction of constituency voting to the electoral system in 2024 would save the country from ruin.
The longer version goes something like this. Constituency voting will allow independents to run. Among them are potential leaders who are currently nonstarters because the major political parties do not like them: Thuli Madonsela and Mmusi Maimane are the most frequently cited examples.
Here is the imagined scenario. The ANC will fall well below 50% in 2024. None of the established parties will be able to form a government, because relations between them have been poisoned by coalition politics in the metros. The only conceivable compromise will be for parliament to elect as president a figure from outside party politics. And so after 30 years of party-political misrule, the country will finally be led by a genuine child of the fertile SA soil.
I want to say two things about this scenario. The first is that it is daft. The second is to ask from whence this daftness comes. First things first: To believe that a person who gets half a million, or even one million votes has the authority to be a successful president, is insane. How are the 17 million who voted for others going to feel?
The names of potential presidents being bandied about are all darlings of sections of the middle classes. One would have thought that after 30 years of democracy the radical diversity of political perspectives among South Africans would have become obvious. Astonishingly, people still assume that because a political figure is their darling, 17 million other South Africans feel the same way.
Second, in the scenario conjured by the magical thinkers the new, independent president will have the power to command a fractured, embittered, horribly divided coalition government. How on earth will, say, a Madonsela do this when she does not have a party machine? You cannot command a legislature or an executive without such machinery behind you. The idea that anyone could is bizarre. Maimane’s vision of leading a motley cluster of independent candidates only draws attention to the problem.
The magical thinkers will tell you others have come to power in recent times precisely because they stood on platforms opposed to established parties: Emmanuel Macron in France; Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. But these examples are in no way comparable. Macron and Zelensky both won presidential elections, for heaven’s sake. Both formed new parties that won sizeable proportions of the national vote. That is what gave them the authority and the means to govern.
Even then, both men came close to losing power soon after they acquired it, ’precisely because their party machines were new and not yet effective. Indeed, Zelensky s party, Servant of the People, was imploding in the second half of 2021; the threat of Russian invasion, followed by the actual invasion in February 2022, is most likely to have saved his political career.
If the notion that an independent candidate can form a government is crazy, from whence does this craziness come? From depression, alienation and hopelessness. When the world as it is seems to offer no way out of an impasse, what’s left is to conjure a parallel world of fantasy.
On the planet where we actually live, political parties form governments. The only conceivable way out of the impasse is to make them strong and healthy. Alas, we have an electoral system, one of proportional representation with the lowest possible threshold for getting parliamentary seats, that encourages the creation of parties that are neither strong nor healthy. Instead, it encourages the mushrooming of extreme, eccentric parties, and makes them potential kingmakers.
SA does indeed need electoral reform, but not so that an independent candidate with half a million votes can govern. We need a system designed to ensure that a small number of big parties compete for a majority. That is how to mould parties into entities that will actually represent the country.