Will Government Deliver Where You Live? Voters Ask

For ordinary South Africans, the most practical question in any election is a simple one: will government work where I live, whoever I am? Two developments in the past week speak directly to that question. Together they suggest the country’s political landscape is shifting in ways that matter to every voter, in every community.

The first concerns who now supports the Democratic Alliance. New polling by the Social Research Foundation, reported on by The Common Sense, found that black South Africans now make up the largest share of the DA’s support base. When respondents who said they vote DA were broken down by race, 36% were black South Africans, 35% white, 22% Coloured and 7% Indian. No other party in South Africa can claim a support base of that diversity. The DA argues that this figure exposes, once and for all, what it calls the lies the ANC often tells about the party.

Meanwhile, the second development came from the Electoral Commission, which confirmed that the DA is the only political party fielding a candidate in every one of South Africa’s 4485 wards in the 4 November local government election. That gives the party the largest national footprint of any political party in the country. For voters, the practical meaning is straightforward: wherever they live, there will be a DA candidate on the ballot, competing for their support and making the party’s case in their community.

Taken together, the two pieces of news are what economists call leading indicators, early signs that point to bigger change ahead. The party’s federal leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, argues that South African politics is moving away from the politics of old, in which communities were placed into predictable political boxes and race, geography or history were assumed to determine how people would vote.

The public stake in that shift is considerable. When the assumption that voting patterns are fixed begins to break, as Hill-Lewis says it now is, parties must compete for every voter in every community on what they offer and what they deliver. In that kind of contest, citizens hold the stronger hand, because the parties seeking their votes must speak to their daily needs rather than rely on inherited loyalties.

The DA points to what it says voters can already see where the party governs: jobs in a growing economy, reliable basic services, honest government, and the expectation that wherever you live and whatever your background, government should work for you. Hill-Lewis says he has experienced the party’s growing support on the ground while travelling across South Africa during the campaign, and that people can feel the DA is the only party in the country that cares about bringing people together rather than pushing them apart.

There is already evidence, the party argues, that no community belongs permanently to any political party. Earlier this year, voters in Ward 28 in Evaton elected DA councillor Maki Tshabalala in a ward the ANC had won in every election since 1994. For the residents of that ward, the result meant that a long-standing political monopoly had been broken at the ballot box, and that the choice of who represents them now rests, as it should in a democracy, with the voters themselves.

Hill-Lewis frames the weeks ahead as a test of whether this change will consolidate. He asks voters to bring their family and friends to show up on election day, and to make this election the truly watershed moment he believes it is poised to be. His closing message is directed at the whole country rather than any single community: he believes South Africa’s best days still lie ahead, and that South Africa can work, in his words, for everyone.

Whether or not the leading indicators prove accurate, the underlying proposition speaks to the public interest directly. A democracy in which parties must earn every vote, in every ward, on their record of delivery is one in which citizens, not political tradition, decide who governs. On 4 November, South Africans will have the chance to test that proposition themselves.