South African voters expected to cross racial lines in national elections
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa Voting, like life itself in South Africa, has long been divided along racial lines.
The black majority mostly backs the African National Congress, which has ruled since the fall of apartheid in 1994, and most white voters choose the opposition Democratic Alliance, whose power is strongest in the white-majority state that includes Cape Town.
When South Africans vote on Wednesday, polls show, those colorcoded patterns will remain mostly true: The ANC is widely expected to remain in power. But those same polls also show growing white support for the ANC, and growing black support for the DA and other parties, underlining a decline in traditional allegiances that could reshape a new generation of politics here.
“The broad frame is changing, and there’s lots of flux, emotionally and intellectually, for all South Africans,” said David Everatt, the head of the School of Governance at the University of the Witwatersrand, whom the ANC hired to lead its internal polling.“it is not a truism anymore that South African elections are essentially a racial census.”
A quarter century has passed since South Africa ended white-minority rule with its all-encompassing system of segregation and monopoly on force. But apartheid has survived both geographically and economically: South Africa is one of the world’s most unequal societies.
White South Africans make up less than one-tenth of the population but own most of the country’s land and control almost all its wealth. Less than half of the working-age black population is employed. The indelible apartheid-era patchwork of dense black “townships” and fenced-off white suburbs persists across the South African landscape. The country has the continent’s most industrialized economy, but black South Africans live on the periphery of its main engines.
An increasing number of black voters feel that the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, has betrayed its quest for black empowerment and has become corrupt, nepotistic and mediocre. At the Democratic Alliance’s final campaign rally in Soweto, the vast suburb of Johannesburg home to mostly poor and middle-class black South Africans, the crowd was full of the disaffected.
The DA is capitalizing on the anger of older South Africans who feel betrayed, and younger ones, like Khathu Rasilingwane, 29, who have degrees but can’t find jobs and feel the country “has moved backward since the end of apartheid.” The tide of mistrust in the ANC has propelled the DA to power in some South African cities, including Johannesburg, its largest city, and Pretoria, the capital.
Meanwhile, some white South Africans have pledged to vote for the ANC for the first time in their lives. In Gauteng, the state where both Johannesburg and Pretoria are located, almost a quarter of white respondents were considering voting for the ANC, according to Everatt’s polling, up from less than 5 percent in past elections.
The shift comes as the ANC’S leadership has passed from Jacob Zuma to Cyril Ramaphosa, a former business magnate who many South Africans perceive to be less corrupt. Zuma was accused of racketeering and embezzlement. Ramaphosa’s popularity in the white community in particular has opened up the possibility for the ANC of winning back lost ground in South Africa’s wealthier cities.
None of the half-dozen white voters who told The Washington Post they planned to vote for the ANC for the first time agreed to be quoted by name, for fear of social repercussions from white friends, colleagues and family.
Ramaphosa’s proposal to redistribute wealth by expropriating some white-owned land without compensation has been dismissed by many as a ruse to shore up black support.
Belief among black voters that Ramaphosa isn’t serious about redistributing wealth spurred the formation of a breakaway party, led by the ANC’S former youth league president, Julius Malema.