And these little piggies had none …
United States senator Eugene Mccarthy once remarked that politicians react to the cold in much the same way as pigs — they stand in a circle with their snouts between the hind legs of the pig in front.
This is the likely outcome of election 2004 for the main opposition parties. The probability is that the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Inkatha Freedom Party will be driven into a warmer embrace, while the decimated New National Party (NNP) will have no choice but to force its snout more firmly between the hind legs of the ANC.
But DA leader Tony Leon’s forecast that the election would move South Africa towards a two-party system — with the ANC confronting the DA, and opposition minnows driven to extinction — has not been vindicated.
Four of the small opposition parties — Bantu Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement (UDM), the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) — have indeed taken heavy hits or have failed to improve on their miserable 1999 showing.
With about 77% of the vote in, support for the UDM, hit by defections during the floor-crossing period and factional strife, was at 1.85% for the national ballot, while the PAC held steady at less than 1%. Support for the ACDP was at 1.82%. Most ominous for the UDM was the projected halving of its support for the Eastern Cape legislature, where after 1999 it was the official opposition. It polled 5.71%, behind the DA’S 9.97%.
Leon’s prediction in the Mail & Guardian that “the moon is made of blue cheese” if Marthinus van Schalkwyk’s NNP improved its 1999 result was also confirmed. The NNP’S national collapse — from 6.87% in the last election to 2.04% in this poll — was dramatic, even for pundits who foresaw that its pact with the ANC would repel conservative whites and coloureds who make up its base.
This effectively means that the NNP has ceased to exist as a national political organisation. But it appears that some Western Cape voters split their ballot to support the party — where it secured 10.16% of the provincial vote, still down on 1999 (38.39%).
So, with the NNP and UDM almost driven to the wall and smaller parties stranded in the shallows, Leon’s DA must have profited. Well, no.
Early on Thursday, the DA was looking well set with about 17%. But as the rural count came in, its share started to wane. The DA’S share of the national vote late on Thursday was 15.11%, with some analysts forecasting a final figure of about 13%.
This does not vindicate Leon’s earlier claim to the M&G that his party had “grown tremendously”, and falls short of the 16.43% the Democratic Party and the NNP polled together in 1999. Leon must have been aiming to clean up the NNP’S 1999 support, and in his fondest daydreams may have fantasised about 20% of the vote.
What went wrong? A minor factor may have been Pieter Mulder’s Vryheidsfront-plus, which rallied in the platteland and may have eroded the right-wing support the DA picked up in 1999. The Vf-plus polled 1.32% nationally (0.8% in 1999), but its inroads in white Afrikaner regional strongholds were more significant — in the Free State, for example, it secured 3.37% of the poll.
Mulder ran a canny campaign which de-emphasised race and spoke the modern international language of minority rights and ethnic self-determination.
There were signs — most particularly in a recent Bloemfontein by-election and a municipal poll in Ermelo a year ago — that the romance between white platteland Afrikaners and the DA might be losing some of its heat.
The other spanner in the DA’S works was, of course, Patricia de Lille’s Independent Democrats (ID), which won 2.07% of the national vote and about 8.77% of the coloured-dominated provincial vote in the Western Cape and 6.7% in the Northern Cape.
It seems certain that the ID drew a significant share of the white left-liberal vote, which might otherwise have plumped for the DA.
Leon, caught as always between pandering to white and coloured right-wingers and holding the DA’S traditional liberal constituency, exposed his left flank by running a right-leaning campaign that, among other things, endorsed the death penalty.
“Suzmanite” DA supporters may have fled to the De Lille in numbers.