When registered voters make the short journey from their homes or places of work to their voting station on Wednesday, two of the ballot papers they will be handed will be for the election of political parties or independent candidates to the National Assembly. The names of 70 political parties will appear on these two national ballots, representing only 18% of the 381 national-level political parties that initially registered with the IEC to contest the election.
An even smaller percentage will make it to parliament. Out of the 70 parties contesting, fewer than 20 will likely win a single seat in the National Assembly. In 2019, of 40 political parties on the national ballot only 14 secured one or more seats in the National Assembly. That is an electoral success rate of 29%, which drops to 4% if we include the more than 300 parties that registered with the IEC for the national poll.
There is a reason that the odds of an aspirant parliamentary party making it into office are so low in our electoral system. We have thresholds in place that are dictated by electoral participation.
In 2019, the national seat threshold was roughly 43,594 votes per seat, based on 17,437,379 valid national votes. If all 27.7-million registered voters were to turn out on Wednesday, the 2024 threshold would climb to roughly 70,000 votes to win a seat in parliament.
All of this is to say it is very difficult to win even one seat in parliament. Our system champions a plurality of political views while simultaneously imposing natural thresholds that make becoming a representative in that plurality something only about 4% of registered parties ever achieve.
Why, then, is the government so eager to impose further — and entirely arbitrary — thresholds on our electoral system, further limiting political participation and nullifying voters’ choices?
It is also fair and upholds the principle of proportionality, a value so fundamental to our democratic system that it is entrenched in our constitution. Parliament is not allowed to pass legislation that dilutes the power of people’s votes.
Why, then, is the government so eager to impose further — and entirely arbitrary — thresholds on our electoral system, further limiting political participation and nullifying voters’ choices?
The minister of co-operative governance & traditional affairs, Thembi Nkadimeng, this week triumphantly announced the gazetting of the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill, which the minister herself is already calling the “coalitions bill”.
According to Nkadimeng, the bill is a response to a “public outcry” over the “increased number of hung councils from 24 in 2000 to ... 81 municipalities affected post the 2021 local government elections”.
We know from the National Dialogue on Coalition Governments chaired by Deputy President Paul Mashatile in Cape Town last year that South Africa’s two biggest parties, the ANC and the DA, are ruthlessly fixated on this issue, citing “instability” as a result of the coalition government negotiations after the 2021 local elections.
The bill was first mooted at the Cape Town dialogue and rightly drew the ire of opposition leaders, who questioned the good faith of convening such a dialogue when the bill had already been drafted. Minister of tourism and GOOD leader Patricia de Lille did the maths: if a 1% threshold had been in place in 2019, nine opposition political parties would have been wiped from the parliamentary benches, leaving only five parties in the National Assembly.
In addition, a 1% threshold based on 2019's turnout would amount to about 174,374 wasted votes per political party falling below 1% — the equivalent of four parliamentary seats.
The nine parties that each won four or fewer seats in the 2019 elections collectively account for 18 seats and about 784,674 votes that would have gone to waste had this completely arbitrary threshold been in place. All of this so that the remaining five parties can divide among themselves the unearned spoils of wasted votes.
Beware the party in decline that suddenly wants to narrow the field in the name of “stability”.
Speaking of stability, Nkadimeng reported in November 2023 that 32 municipalities in South Africa were under administration in terms of section 139 of the constitution. This intervention is imposed on municipalities that fail to manage their administrative, budgetary and financial obligations effectively and have not fulfilled their obligation to provide residents with basic services.
Of these 32 failed municipalities, only six are in one of the 70 hung municipal councils where no single party won a 50%+1 majority in the 2021 local elections. All six of these hung councils were already under administration before the 2021 elections took place. The remaining 26 failed municipalities are governed by a single — allegedly “stable” — political party with a council majority and a full mandate.
The truth is there is no correlation whatsoever between political party size and stability or integrity in governance. There are small political parties with leaders of probity who can competently deliver to the people they serve. And there are large political parties with incompetent, unscrupulous leaders who could not credibly run a bath.
Wiping small parties off the electoral map is no guarantee of stability — the residents of South Africa’s 32 failed municipalities can attest to this. A 1% threshold for council, provincial, or parliamentary representation serves only one purpose: to arrest the decline of larger parties that would prefer to no longer compete on a level playing field.
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