The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same 3
It seems despite the congratulatory backpats these past elections might not have been the results the DA was hoping for. Compare the following results in the Western Cape between the 2000 and 2006 local elections
| Party | 2000 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|
| DA | 52.3 | 41.85 |
| ANC | 37.3 | 37.91 |
| ID | 0 | 10.75 |
| Other | 10.4 | 9.49 |
Basically everyone stayed steady except for the DA who lost 11% seemingly straight to the ID. Granted in 2000 the DA was merged with the NNP whose councillors then crossed over to the ANC (probably only to find themselves off the ANC electoral list this year… suckers). But still, that’s a 10% knock in your strongest province. This coupled with the things highlighted in the comments section of this thread over at Someamongus’ South Africa blog highlight the fact that the DA is treading water at the moment.
They desperately need a prominent municipality (like Cape Town) to prove to voters that they are capable of governing effectively and can do a better job than the ANC. Otherwise ANC voters will refuse to look at them preferring to make their grievances known via non-election means such as the township demonstrations over delivery that have come to the fore in the past few months.
So for the sake of having a decent opposition let’s hope that Tony’s got a game plan.
Update: Laurence at Commentary discusses the DA malaise in more detail.
Update: DA insider DA Mal posts a response.
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
http://politics.za.net/articles/trackback/66
Wait up now…I think you are underestimating the impact the NNP split had on the DA’s electoral results in Cape Town and nationally. In the 2000 local government elections (with the NNP) the DA enjoyed over 20% of the vote nationally. In the 2004 natioanl elections (without the NNP) they got just over 12%.
Granted that opposition parties generally perform better in local elections, it must be recognized that the NNP split hit the DA hard.
Consider that the DA has actually increased its support in real numbers of votes from 284 863 votes in 2004 to 303 285 last Wednesday.
That is a total increase of 18 422 votes over the 2004 result. The ANC on the other hand received 200 493 fewer votes than it did in 2004. This is evidence for your point that although people are not voting ANC, they aren’t voting DA either. This is a BIG problem for the DA, which they ignore at their peril. This simply must be addressed if they are to have any future beyond minority opposition.
As an aside, the ID also received 7640 fewer votes in this election than they did in 2004, going from 85 729 to 78 089. This may point to a slow weakening of the terrible grip that personality politics has over the Western Cape.
They did increase the number of votes they received but it doesn’t seemed to have paid off into an increase in political power.
Hi Farrel – In an effort to prevent myself dumping huge comments into other people’s blogs, I’ve written up my response to this on the old DA Mal site. This means I’m going to adopt another horrible bad habit of blog commenters – add a hyperlink to someone else’s blog.
Here goes. Delete this comment if you feel you have to…
http://da-mal.blogspot.com/2006/03/response-to-cassandra.html