Election results seem to be fairly negotiable these days and at the time of writing Jair Bolsonaro hadn’t yet conceded defeat, but if nothing dramatic happens it looks as if the people of Brazil have decided that a corrupt, Amazon-burning left-wing government is slightly preferable to a corrupt, Amazon-burning right-wing government, at least until they change their minds again.
This is relevant to South Africa for two reasons.
The first is that it offers hope and inspiration to a very sad and put-upon segment of our society, namely, politicians.
For years they have been told that we, the people, are tired of their nonsense and we want real, measurable change. The people of Brazil, however, have just proved that what most people really want is simply the other lot.
It doesn’t matter how corrupt or dysfunctional your last term in office was or how much rainforest you slashed and burnt or how many scandals you oversaw. All that matters, it turns out, is hanging around in the wings, staying out of jail or simply staying alive long enough for the incumbent to make themselves so loathed that the people will beg you to come back so you can save them from their wretchedness with your particular brand of tried and tested, nostalgia-tinged wretchedness.
The second reason for optimism is the enormous turnout in Brazil for these elections, about 79%, which will reassure our politicians that you really can fool most of the people most of the time.
This would have been alarming to people like Fikile Mbalula or Lindiwe Sisulu who are fooling nobody, ever, and who would have felt their failure more acutely than they usually do each morning as they chew listlessly on their Fruit Loops and wonder if everyone else finds work as difficult as they do.
For the rest of South Africa’s ruling gerontocracy, however, the news coming out of Brazil would have been greatly encouraging, with many of the younger cadres starting to plan their second career when they are voted back into power as they enter their 80s, the prime of political life in Africa.
But the trouble with making such plans is that this isn’t Brazil. This is South Africa, where we don’t vote for the other lot. Instead, if we don’t like our lot, we don’t vote at all: recent by-elections have seen the sort of crowds you might get at a matinee performance of a show in which the postal service is celebrated through three hours of interpretive dance.
I can understand why small by-elections don’t exactly whip us into a frenzy of ballot-casting, but we’ve also started ghosting on general elections.
As I wrote in my last book, once you start looking at the turnout of eligible voters in 2019 rather than simply at the number of votes cast, you quickly discover that “72.1% of eligible voters do not endorse the ANC, 90% do not endorse the DA, and 94.8% do not endorse the EFF”.
Our Big Three, it turns out, are simply the three parties least ignored by the electorate, the majority of which did not vote in the 2019 general elections.
To be fair, this is not a particularly South African phenomenon.
The 2020 election in the US was, according to much of the commentary in the months building up to it, a clash of civilisations that would inspire unprecedented activism on both sides of a huge and perilous divide.
Everything seemed to be on the line, from liberal democracy, human rights and civil liberties to freedom, Christianity and the future of the Union itself. And yet, when all was said, done, denied, recounted, denied again, lied about to raise funds, dismissed by multiple courts and finally carried through the capital by a shirtless fake shaman wearing buffalo horns, just 34.9% of eligible voters had stirred themselves to support Joe Biden while 31.9% had come out to back Donald Trump.
In other words, if the US is fatally split — and it may well be — it is split not in two but into three: Democrat, Republican and Gatvol.
In case I sound as if I’m giving the no-shows credit as an active or conscious political force, let me be clear: I don’t believe that withholding your vote is a useful strategy. It certainly doesn’t force politicians to register your disgust — for heaven’s sake, they can barely stir themselves to register the complaints of people who actually vote for them — and I’m not sure that mass stayaways would do the trick either: I don’t know what the smallest possible turnout is that would still produce a legitimate result, but I’m pretty sure that if just three votes were cast your average politician would only be interested in the two voters who’d given them the win.
It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that our fates will be decided in 2024 by that same bloc, not because it will force politicians to behave or deliver but because small turnouts often produce big — and wild — results.
Is there a party or an activist movement that can lure them and their immense political clout back? I don’t know. But how strange it is to live in a country being strangled by one ruinous party as the people who could end it all sit back glumly muttering how there’s nothing anyone can do.
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