The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Political Power by Susan Booysen

Author:Susan Booysen [Booysen, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Democracy, Political Ideologies, Political Parties, Political Science, Political Process
ISBN: 9781868147816
Google: mDZjDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 14936819
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2011-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE TUMULTUOUS PARTY POLITICAL SETTING

From 2000-07, South Africa’s political parties became embroiled in a chain of alliance and defection events that re-shaped power balances nationally, provincially in two of the nine provinces, and in a host of local governments.6 It took a further two years to 2009 to legally reverse the system. The period was ethically uncomfortable, as political parties (in particular the ANC) let opportunism and party-interest rule. It was a discomforting time, as opportunists and ‘crosstitutes’,7 in the robes of discoverers of common-ground values and shared policy principles, pranced across the political landscape.

Floor-crossing facilitated and accelerated the reorganisation and stabilisation of the party system in South Africa. It wiped up small and dying political parties and, most of all, bolstered the ANC’s power over opposition parties. Outcries against both the 2003 amendment of the South African Constitution to create window periods for defection, and the argued disproportionality of representation that resulted, came full circle in the abandonment of floor-crossing ... This step was taken with the support of the ANC, but only after the ANC had gained substantial benefits.

The concerns were that significant party changes were materialising through mechanisms beyond electoral verdicts, and that post-floor-crossing representation deviated from electoral proportions. The cumulative changes in party electoral strengths, however, suggested that elections and floor-crossing in this period had often worked in tandem (on national level and in some provinces) to accelerate electoral reconfigurations of party politics in South Africa. Elections took their lead from the new levels of support in representative institutions that the ANC had acquired in preceding floor-crossing sessions. Election 2004 amplified the boosted support that the ANC gained in the preceding spate of floor-crossings.8 This put paid to the criticism that floor-crossing at the time had created disproportionality in terms of the electoral system of proportional representation (PR). In the two subsequent floor-crossing windows from 2004-09 the ANC further climbed the parliamentary percentage ladder to the pinnacle of 74.25 per cent of MPs in Parliament on the eve of Election 2009. This time around, the floor-crossing dividend had bloated ANC support beyond what was electorally sustainable, particularly in the aftermath of the Cope division. Parliamentary election 2009 cut the ANC’s boosted standing, courtesy of floor-crossing, by roughly 8 percentage points.

In contrast with coalition and defection politics internationally, South Africa’s national-level floor-crossing did not aim at constituting a new national governing majority or ousting an incumbent from power. On the provincial level, however, the ANC did have these designs. Here, events were motivated, first, by the desire of the governing ANC to consolidate its 1994 victory by also taking control of the two provinces of the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, in which the ANC had not achieved outright majorities in the 1994 and 1999 elections. The defection-alliance cycle was also driven by the ANC’s pre-emptive desire to prevent the support base of the fast-disintegrating former apartheid governing party, the New National Party (NNP) from falling into the hands of the de facto NNP successor, the DA. These designs were partially realised.

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