A theatre of broken ambitions, crushed egos and ruined finances will again play out in the next few days as the IEC’s electronic results boards get populated. A multitude of small political parties will wake up to the rude reality that they have not achieved (even) the 0.25% of the national vote that is required to get one member elected to South Africa’s National Assembly.
South Africa in its previous six sets of national and provincial elections has established a culture of small, new and untested political parties throwing their names and limited track records into the election hat and hoping to emerge with political wonderkid glory. History of elections and party politics has taught us that these newcomers with their limited political roots and low public profiles have dismal prospects. They also face the fate of forfeited deposits.
A range of public opinion polls has been suggesting that only a handful of the newcomer parties of Election 2024 are likely to break through into the National Assembly.
Democratic South Africa’s six elections up to 2019 – and especially the last five – have delivered quite consistent results as to the number of parties that win seats. Besides the seven parties represented in the National Assembly following Election 1994, the next five elections delivered MPs to 13 parties in Election 1999, 12 in Election 2004, 13 in Election 2009, 13 again in Election 2014, and 14 in Election 2019.
This consistency of parties gaining national representation persisted in the face of the mushrooming of the number of contesting parties. At Election 1994, a total of 29 parties contested, and this declined to 16 in Election 1999. Thereafter the number grew consistently: 21 in Election 2004, 26 in Election 2009, 39 in Election 2014, 48 in Election 2019, and now 52 parties and independents in Election 2024. A total of 31 of these parties will be first-time contestants in national elections.
The results boards at the IEC’s Results Operation Centre (ROC) anticipate the fate of many of these newcomers who are trying their luck. The bulk of the party name acronyms on the boards and the party desks around the major ROC hall tell the pending dystopian story of parties that have never, or hardly, at best, featured in national narratives. Many of them will probably never be heard of again – except in IEC records and the postmortems that will follow in the wake of Election 2024. These trends are repeated across the provinces. For example, 45 parties and independents are fighting it out in Gauteng, 34 in Limpopo and 33 in KwaZulu-Natal. The Northern Cape, on 24, has the lowest count of participants.
These electoral excursions obviously come at a price. To illustrate, a party that contested the compensatory seats in the National Assembly and all the nine regions, had to deposit R300,000 plus R50 000 for each of the provincial legislatures. The deposits for independent candidates came to R20 000 for each region and R15 000 to contest in a provincial legislature. Expect the IEC coffers to be swelled by quite a few Rands.
Besides these immediate fates of political contestants, South Africa’s small-party phenomenon stands in the context of the ongoing fragmentation of South African political parties, where the larger parties have been shedding split-offs, in multiple phases over much of the last decade. No one, singular opposition force has emerged to replace the declining parties. In addition, small parties have been smelling the roses of coalition king-making opportunities. From local government coalition praxis they have seen how small parties, or independents, have been king-making and have been banking high positions and other forms of patronage.
In just a day or two, we shall know the extent to which a new class of national coalition kingmakers will be calling some important political shots.
Professor Susan Booysen is a political analyst, Director of research at MISTRA, and visiting professor at the Wits School of Governance
