Is the Freedom Front Plus making the laager bigger?

Every now and then something happens in politics that really surprises me. This weekend someone sent me some of the Freedom Front Plus’s election videos. They were fast-moving photos of their various mayoral candidates around the country.

At first, I watched with one eye, but then became more interested. As expected, the majority of faces were white, but the list was far from the lily-white candidates’ list of the Freedom Front Plus under Constant Viljoen’s leadership.

I then looked at the next video which depicted the candidates for the Drakenstein Municipality - a big 65-seater council in the Western Cape. I counted heads. It turns out that only 15 of the 33 ward candidates were white.

Research showed that in Mossel Bay, only 9 out of the 15 ward FF+ candidates were white, and in Cape Town Metro, only 32%.

I say “only” because, given the FF+’s history, one would expect something different. Of course, their list still does not reflect the actual demographics of the area, but I started to wonder: Is it possible that the Freedom Front+ is becoming the most racially diverse party in the country – if not in membership, then in their candidate lists?

We know that the EFF makes no excuses for not wanting (and perhaps not even allowing) whites in any elective positions. 

The ANC still proclaims multi-racialism and certainly has a few candidates from minority groups, but experience has shown that this has significantly reduced since 1994.

The DA insists that they are representative of the country’s racial demographic. The problem is that they are going backward rather than forward when it comes to senior leadership. On the same day I received the FF+ videos someone also sent me a meme with two DA election posters on it. The one had Patricia de Lille, Helen Zille and Lindiwe Mazibuko’s faces on it.  The other had Geordin Hill-Lewis, John Steenhuizen and Alan Winde.

I’m not sure if they were/are actual posters, but the point was well made. At the time of the 2014 elections, the DA was dominated by three racially diverse women. (De Lille as Mayor of Cape Town, Zille as Premier of Western Cape and Mazibuko leader of the opposition in the national parliament). Today Geordin Hill-Lewis will almost certainly become mayor of Cape Town; Alan Winde has replaced Helen Zille and John Steenhuizen now leads the DA in parliament.

The DA has also lost a huge amount of support to the FF+ over recent years – especially in the inland provinces of Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo and North West. In these provinces, the FF+ nearly doubled their support during the last national election. Their gain was almost to the decimal point equal to the loss of the DA in these areas. 

This was largely due to white, Afrikaans voters moving back to the FF+. During the Zuma years, many FF+ supporters were convinced to vote DA in order to “consolidate the opposition against Jacob Zuma”. However, this was not so much a vote for the DA as against the then President. These voters have very little objection to Ramaphosa - in fact, he is rather popular amongst Afrikaner voters as far as ANC leaders go. So, once he took over as President, they returned to the party that they felt would address their concerns around issues such as language, mother tongue education, land security, etc.

Unsurprisingly the FF+ gained 6 additional seats in the National Assembly during the 2019 election, whilst the DA lost 5.

Of course, the FF+ knows that there is a natural ceiling in terms of the growth in votes that they can attract from white Afrikaans voters. They have been aware that to continue this growth trajectory they must gain support amongst other racial groups as well.

So, more enlightened people in the party (such as Corne Mulder) have been building a more racially inclusive ideology within the party.  According to Mulder, the party is now no longer rooted in Afrikaner nationalism.  They still focus on Afrikaans issues, but no longer only on (white) Afrikaners – but also especially on Coloured voters in the Western Cape.

In this regard, the DA-controlled Drakenstein Municipality would be interesting to watch in the upcoming election. This municipality -which is 72,5% Afrikaans speaking and has a population breakdown of 62,5% Coloured, 22,7% Black and 13,5% White voters- is the perfect test case for this new ideological positioning of the FF+, hence their snazzy election video and racial diverse candidate list for that area.

Only time will tell if this strategy of the FF+ will work, but if it does, it would be an extremely interesting shift in South African oppositional politics.