Parties face backlash if voters reject coalitions
If the latest election polls are anything to go by, the country’s economic hub, Gauteng, could find itself governed by a coalition after the May 8 polls. Coalition governments are not new to SA, especially after the 2016 local government elections, after which DA-led coalitions took control of three of the country’s metros with the co-operation of the EFF.
But this time coalitions could look very different. An important question is whether voters have the right to know, before the polls, who their preferred party would be working with if a coalition is on the cards. Some might then think twice about their vote.
Herman Mashaba said he would resign as Johannesburg mayor if the DA went into a coalition with the ANC. “I will never work with the ANC. If the DA or anyone else would work with the ANC, I would resign yesterday,” Mashaba told Business Day. He would not work with “criminals”.
The EFF in all likelihood will be the kingmaker, if in provinces such as Gauteng neither the ANC nor the DA is able to clinch the 50% needed to
govern. The other provinces to keep an eye on are the Northern Cape and North West.
The ANC and DA could work together, which in essence would be a grand coalition, but this is unlikely to happen despite the parties being more ideologically aligned with each other. The other option is for the DA to partner with the EFF, but the red berets’ leader, Julius Malema, has said publicly he will not work with the DA again. He did say he will work with the ANC, but it all depends on what is placed on the table.
In 2016 both the ANC and DA courted the EFF in the hope of garnering its support in the country’s metros. At the time the ANC would not accede to the EFF’s demands, which included removing former president Jacob Zuma. So in the end the EFF did not enter into coalition with the DA, but gave the party its support when it came to voting for the mayor and on an issue-by-issue basis, giving the EFF great power.
At the time, some EFF supporters saw the party as selling out when it voted with the DA, while another section of its support base would have been extremely upset if the party had voted with the ANC. Malema described it as choosing between two devils.
The turmoil over who to work with is even more of an issue in these elections as voters have had a taste of what could happen in a minority coalition government. If parties publicly announce who they are prepared to work with they could alienate some voters, and in a critical election like this one every vote is needed.
According to a position paper by a Heinrich Boell Foundation project called Political Party Co-Operation and the Building and Sustaining of Coalitions, voter backlash is one of the biggest dangers to parties when co-operating with others and in the process making concessions to those considered electoral enemies.
We have seen that coalitions in SA are not necessarily based on principle or ideology, but on gaining power. According to the position paper, high-level politicians said they had received death threats from voters in 2018 after entering into coalition agreements with “electoral foes”.
One cannot blame voters for being upset, especially if they have given their vote to a party that backtracks on promises due to coalition agreements.
The African Independent Congress (AIC) might serve as one such example. After the local government elections it went into a coalition with the ANC partly based on an agreement on reincorporating Matatiele into KwaZulu-Natal. The town was moved from KwaZulu-Natal to the Eastern Cape in 2005. However, almost three years later this has not yet happened and the ANC, despite threats from the AIC, still governs in Ekurhuleni, with AIC support.
In Nelson Mandela Bay, a game of musical chairs was played with the leadership of the metro. The margins there were so small that the Patriotic Alliance, with one seat, and the United Democratic Movement with two seats, were able to swing the power balance at the drop of a hat, despite the DA having almost 47% of the support in the metro.
Given the power that smaller parties can wield and what is at stake like passing budgets in time, as required by the legislation it would not be going too far to demand that parties declare who they would be willing to work with.
There is also a case to be made for formal coalition agreements after elections, and that these be made public. In 2018 the Constitutional Court ruled that political parties had to disclose details of their private funding, and declared the Promotion of Access to Information Act invalid to the extent that it failed to provide for such a form of transparency.
According to Mike Law, senior legal researcher in public law at the University of Cape Town, the court held that political parties are not “public bodies” under the definition of the Promotion of Access to Information Act, and are not allowed to hide behind the act to bypass the constitutional requirements of transparency.
“Their activities have a significant public impact and the information that they hold affects the rights of citizens, most notably the right to vote,” Law said.
In the context of coalition agreements, certain aspects of the judgment may be instructive if an argument were to be made that for the rights of citizens to be fully realised, such information should be publicly available, he said.
So if political parties grandly declare that coalition governments are the future they should take the next step and tell voters exactly what the future might hold. It is not enough to merely tell people that the aim is to win. What happens if they don’t?
GIVEN THE POWER SMALLER PARTIES CAN WIELD, IT WOULD NOT BE GOING TOO FAR TO DEMAND THAT PARTIES DECLARE WHO THEY WOULD BE WILLING TO WORK WITH