The vexed act of voting in South Africa’s Election 2024

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Professor Susan Booysen, is a political analyst, Director of research at MISTRA, and visiting professor at the Wits School of Governance

The individual voting act in South Africa’s Election 2024 is vastly more complex – and vexed – than in at least the preceding five sets of national elections.

Less than a week before the election vast numbers of South African voters say they remain undecided as to which party or independent candidate on the 52-strong national ballot they will vote for. The indecision is caused to a significant extent by the ogre of likely coalition governments following the election.

As context, in the last two years surveys such as those by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), and most recently Afro Barometer have shown that South Africa is ‘a nation divided’ when it comes to coalitions.

Many citizens welcome the inclusivity and improved government accountability that are associated with some coalition governments.

Others fear the chaos unleashed by political parties behaving badly when they are in coalition governments – the parties act for own gain, try to win the majorities that had eluded them in the preceding election, and care little for the citizens they are supposed to serve. In the current campaign, and contributing to citizen vote indecision, some parties opportunistically use the dark side of coalition governments to propagate against dilution of the big party votes.

Despite being complicit, if not outright the cause of coalition malfunction, they aver that ‘coalitions are dangerous… vote for the big party and avoid coalitions’.

The watershed elections of 1994 marked the last time that elections were truly a historically ‘make or break’, the exact outcomes significantly uncertain. Those elections introduced a new political and social order – and the voters had the historical task of ringing in that future. Election 2024 brings in another potential historical watershed, and the voters are aware of the enormity of the moment. Yet, their choices are complex.

The significance of the vote this time around lies in the high possibility that the liberation movement party, the African National Congress (ANC), may be at the point of ceding its outright national majority for the first time in its governing history of 30 years. In just the last few years, the ANC has been experiencing an accelerating rate of decline. At national level in elections there had been a roughly four percentage point decline from one election to the next (while at local level the downward margin per election had been in the region of eight percentage points). This time around, the ANC seems destined to drop by about ten percentage points.

The voters of South Africa have the opportunity, if not task, to intervene through their ballots – if they choose to participate in the new transition. Yet their votes will be complex in that they will be voting not simply for one party, but also for possible coalitions that their party or parties of choice (a possibility, given the multiple ballots) may form following the election.

Throughout the intermediary period between 1994 and now the ANC was quite certain to emerge as the overall winner, and the choice was reasonably simple. There were battles with factional split-off parties, especially the Congress of the People (COPE) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). The extent of the damages the split-offs would inflict on the mother-party were uncertain, but it was clear that the ANC would emerge as the majority party.

Come circa 2024, this has changed. There was also no simple split-off.

Rather, South Africa experienced widespread disillusionment with parties and alienation from party politics generally; this also affected the ANC. It combined with fractioning off the ANC. Fragment parties were manifested in, for example, the African Congress of Transformation (ACT), the fleeting Carl Niehaus party (the African Radical Economic Transformation Alliance, Areta), and earlier the African Transformation Movement (ATM).

In addition, the ANC went through the gradual internal isolation and internal ‘banishment’ of the Jacob Zuma faction – to the point the emergence of the unlikely semi-party, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK).

There are many small and micro-parties that form a modest ‘buffer’ or satellite of mini-protectors around the ANC. A vote for them would in effect be a vote for the ANC. Whenever the ANC at the local government level had experienced coalition majority problems, they had come to the rescue. Examples include Al Jama-ah, African Independent Congress, the African People’s Convention (when they made it into parliament), the United Democratic Movement (in recent times), Good, the National Freedom Party, and many others.

These complex tendencies in and around the formerly monolithic ANC are reflected in processes unfolding round the Democratic Alliance (DA) as well. The DA has been unable to consolidate and grow as singular alternative, as the opposition – even if it is likely to remain as the single biggest opposition party and leading figure in the Multi-Party Charter (MPC). The DA has its satellites of split-offs and supplement parties. This has become quite a growth industry. The bloc of parties now includes ActionSA, and possibly extends into, Build One South Africa, Rise Mzansi, and quite of plethora of others.

The Inkatha Freedom Party remains an opportunistic outlier, even if it is a member of the MPC. An IFP vote could be a vote for any party that needs the IFP support bloc and is prepared to indulge its political-cultural pursuits.

Amid these party political complications the baton is now being handed to the ‘ordinary’ voters of South Africa. This time around, they face the ballot choice between not just simply 52 parties, but simultaneously the secondary choice between the main parties and their satellites of associates.

Because voting stands firmly in the context of likely coalition outcomes, voters have to consider the possible coalition relations on which their party of choice will embark. For example, one of the big questions facing opposition voters in 2024 is whether nationally they will exercise a ‘hard opposition choice’ and vote DA, or a ‘soft opposition choice’ and vote for one of the smaller parties that are likely to either stay in the MPC grouping or join it afresh.

Similarly, other segments of the electorate will be deciding whether they do ANC voting, or ‘soft anti-ANC protest’ by voting for one of the micro-parties that are not ANC but will likely come to the ANC’s rescue should the ANC need help to reach the 50% outright majority mark.

A variation on this theme will be whether voters will do ‘hard anti-ANC protest’ by choosing an MK vote while ‘remaining in the ANC’. Despite the rumour mill churning out conspiracy speculation that MK may be a mainstream ANC project, and may in future fuse back into the ANC (after having kept a solid bloc of votes safe for the ANC in 2024), the MK phenomenon for the time being is a crucial part of keeping the ANC below the outright majority mark.

These are just a few of the outlines of the overly complex set of questions that the South African voter faces at the 2024 ballot box. Each time the cross is made the voter will be mindful of its opaque coalition connotations.