Despite the excitement around the DA’s potential to expand its voter base, the party will always be restricted by South Africa’s electoral system and by its dependence on middle-class voters writes Jonny Steinberg.
The gist of much of the commentary on the DA’s federal congress is that the party is finally free to woo black voters because it now has leaders who really want to.
I don’t think that’s wrong, but it is just a part of the story. Expanding the party’s vote base carries risks and rewards, and the balance between them is not in the DA’s hands. It lies in the structure of the situation in which the party lives and breathes.
And one critical component of that structure is South Africa’s electoral system.
For better or worse, our low-threshold PR elections punish parties that attempt to broaden. This is because it rewards small parties to the maximum. And so it is possible for a party to exist solely by fighting the DA every time it tries to expand. The Patriotic Alliance is, for now, the prime example. In any other electoral system, it would be barely relevant, if it survived at all. In ours, its leader gets a Cabinet position and a giant megaphone, and it eats away incrementally at the DA’s vote share in the Western Cape.
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If the DA’s expansion has limits, what exactly are they? I would argue that, in the long term, the greatest restraint on the party will be measured less by race than by class. More specifically, it will be severely punished every time it is perceived to stray from backing to the hilt the interests of the 25 or so percent of the electorate that pays for its healthcare and security and for the education of its children. And I think that this will constrain the party massively, not just in its capacity to increase its vote share but in its ability to address South Africa’s deepest problems.
Why so? Can’t a party protect private health insurance, neighbourhood security and fee-paying education while serving the country as a whole?
Here are two reasons why it is very hard. The first concerns urban space, the second education.
SA’s perverse geography
South Africa will never do much more than stumble along while its urban geography remains so perverse. The OECD estimates that for the lowest quintile of wage earners in South Africa, the journey to and from work costs nearly 40 percent of their wage. No modern economy will enjoy sustained growth in these circumstances. Nor will levels of unemployment come down by much.
The most plausible solution to this very grave problem is urban densification. But that comes with a price. One is that some of the social pathologies currently confined to the peripheries of the cities will move into the suburbs and city centres. Or, at very least, the careful ecologies the middle classes have weaved to keep a violent country at bay will have to be remade. Suburbanites fear densification. And no party whose core support is in the suburbs can do more than nibble at the status quo. Our electoral system just about guarantees that it will be eviscerated. The constraints on the DA seriously tackling South Africa’s most crippling spatial problem are thus severe.
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So too with education. South Africa’s economy will never flourish if its children don’t learn to read and write. And that requires the massive task of fixing no-fee schools. There is a comfortable, self-serving argument abroad that fee-paying and no-fee education reside in separate worlds and have nothing to do with each other. But it is hard to find a serious education economist who thinks that. From placing quotas of poor kids in private schools to redirecting resources to evidence-based programmes in township schools, most policy proposals worth their salt understand that South Africa has a single education system. With fee-paying parents among its core constituents, I’m not sure that the DA can afford to think that way. I’m not sure, in other words, that it has the freedom to address the problems at the root of the education crisis.
An attractive alternative
I don’t want to add a sour note to a happy and hopeful tune. Everyone who was at the DA’s congress came away with a palpable sense of excitement. The ANC has been South Africa’s largest party for far too long. Here, finally, is a glimpse of an attractive alternative, a party whose executive is truly multiracial, whose leader has sophistication and empathy, and whose senior personnel are talented and very serious about governing.
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All strength to the DA. Here’s to its vote share jumping to 30 percent in 2029. Here, indeed, is to the improbable scenario of it beating the ANC. But there is no harm in one columnist trying to look a little further into the future. It will be hard for the DA ever to faithfully represent the interests of those below the top three deciles of South African earners. It will thus also be very hard for the DA to tackle the country’s deepest problems in earnest.
South Africa urgently needs the other 70 percent to be robustly represented. Unfortunately, our electoral system makes it much more likely that their votes will be corralled as angry Coloureds and angry Zulus. Perhaps, at some point, the country will wake up to the fact that our system of political representation weighs the country down.
- Jonny Steinberg teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.
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