There’s one thing about the DA’s flag-burning advert that makes a certain kind of sense, and one thing that is, as the Americans say, dumber than a bag of hammers.
The DA has been very clear about the tentpole on which it has hung its campaign this year. According to John Steenhuisen, unless South Africans “come out in their millions” for the DA or its coalition partners, South Africa is likely to be blighted with an ANC-EFF marriage, a so-called doomsday coalition.
Personally, I don’t think such a coalition is a certainty if the ANC falls below 50%. If the ANC does lose its majority, it will want a partner or partners it can quietly dominate, not a party that will take intense pleasure in loudly and publicly forcing the ANC to dance to its tune.
I suspect the ANC will do anything it can to avoid inviting the EFF into the corridors of power, and if it falls just short, to, say, 49%, it will probably exhaust all other options — like cobbling together the extra one percent from parties like the African Transformation Movement, the Patriotic Alliance and GOOD — before it turns to a jubilant Julius Malema.
In 2019 about 10-million registered voters didn’t show up. That’s an entire ANC waiting to be persuaded to vote. Any party or coalition that claims a large chunk of that bloc can win on May 29
Still, I’m neither a soothsayer nor a pollster. It’s very possible that Ipsos and Steenhuisen are right, and that the ANC is going to fall to something around 44%, with the EFF getting around 11%, adding up to a ruinous coalition with 55% of the vote.
So how does the DA’s moonshot pact defuse that bomb?
As I’ve outlined above, reducing the doomsday coalition to anything in the high 40-percents will simply force it to add a few extra coalition partners, possibly even Jacob Zuma’s MKP. And even that is virtually impossible for the DA to achieve: if the turnout is similar to 2019, reducing the ANC-EFF bloc to 49% would require roughly 1-million ANC and EFF voters to defect to the DA.
This is obviously the stuff of pure fantasy: nobody in the EFF is ever going to leave their party to vote for a coalition that includes either the DA or Freedom Front Plus, which means all 1-million will have to come from the ANC, and I don’t see any reality in which a bloc of ANC voters the size of the IFP and FF+ combined defects to the DA.
No, Steenhuisen and his advisors know that an ANC-EFF coalition is avoided in only one of two ways: either the ANC wins the election or the moonshot coalition does.
The second outcome is, of course, mathematically impossible if the turnout is similar to 2019: according to Ipsos, the parties that comprise the moonshot can expect roughly 32% of the vote. Even if they achieve a miracle, and persuade those million ANC voters to come to the DA, they’d top out at 38%.
In theory, however, there is still a way to win: by dramatically increasing the turnout.
In 2019 about 10-million registered voters didn’t show up. That’s an entire ANC waiting to be persuaded to vote. Any party or coalition that claims a large chunk of that bloc can win on May 29.
Which brings me back to the flag ad.
Not everybody believes that the DA is genuinely trying to win the election with its allies. I’ve heard some suggesting that the moonshot pact is simply a façade behind which the DA can do the work it really cares about: securing the Western Cape.
If, however, you do believe that the party is honest about contesting the leadership of this country, and has realised that its only way forward is to appeal to non-voters, then the ad makes a certain sense.
If I force myself into the shoes of a Steenhuisen or his advisors, I can, in a certain light, see it as an attempt to jolt those 10-million non-voters out of their gloomy or angry or apathetic non-participation, to say to them: “Look, we know you don’t like our politics, and you’re clearly not a fan of politics in general, but if the choice is voting for a party that makes you feel annoyed, uncomfortable, dirty or depressed, or rushing headlong into a failed state, surely you’d be open to voting for us, just this once?”
Personally, I’m not sure that trying to scare voters — “Vote for me or the country burns” — is always a winner, especially not with voters who have shown their ambivalence about party politics by not voting.
Still, if that’s the strategy they agreed upon, then fair enough. But if that’s what was decided, then I don’t understand why Helen Zille tweeted what she tweeted on Tuesday evening, and why the DA hasn’t asked her to delete it.
As DA supporters rolled their eyes at and mocked criticism levelled at the ad, Zille joined them, tweeting: “'Reading for meaning' is not South Africa’s strong suit”. Sjoe.
I expect politicians to say some crazy stuff before an election. But what I don’t expect is to see a party explain that the country will burn if it isn’t saved by reluctant voters — people who have clearly signalled that they don’t love politicians — and then, three weeks before an election, to hear the de facto leader of that party tell those voters that they, along with everyone else who votes DA, and everyone else in other parties who might have been considering it, are intellectually limited.
Like I said, dumber than a bag hammers.
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