Decline of a weakened ANC is not inevitable

POLITICAL commentators often assume that SA is heading towards one of two futures. Either the present “dominant party” democracy will turn into a one-party authoritarian state under a predatory African National Congress (ANC) or a fluid multiparty system will emerge in which competitive elections result in the alternation of parties and coalitions in government.

In reality, however, SA is not likely to follow either of these paths.

On paper, ANC doctrines do indeed imply that a revolutionary transcendence of bourgeois political freedoms will one day be necessary. Should the ANC be in danger of losing an election, its leaders would apparently be under a moral obligation to obstruct democratic campaigning and to stifle media independence in order to secure the future of the movement’s emancipatory project. But the ANC is in fact heavily populated by instinctive democrats. Judicial, media and electoral institutions are robust. And powerful actors in business and civil society would mobilise against authoritarianism.

This does not, however, imply that a flourishing multiparty system is in prospect. Three features of political systems such as SA’s make this unlikely.

First, minor parties in a dominant party system tend to be disabled by their experiences in opposition. In Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in power from 1929 and 1997, lost the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox Quesada, leader of the liberal National Action Party (PAN). PAN, and the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) retained the ideological character of oppositionist parties. Still shouting against the status quo from the margins of the political space, they could not appeal consistently and positively to citizens in the political centre. PRI leaders held their nerve and voter scepticism about the PAN and PRD grew. In 2012, the PRI won back the presidency.

Second, nothing brings about organisational and ideological change more quickly than defeat. Taiwan’s authoritarian party, the Kuomintang (KMT), which gradually introduced multiparty democracy in the 1980s, lost the 2000 presidential elections to the Democratic Progressive Party and suffered setbacks in legislative elections the following year.

The shock of being ejected from office prompted the KMT to remodel leadership elections, create quotas for women, weed out candidates with criminal convictions, and streamline party bureaucracies. Unpopular policy dogmas concerning mainland China were amended to appeal to moderate voters. And KMT leaders built a new coalition with sympathetic opposition parties. By 2008, the KMT was able to take back the presidency.

Finally, dominant parties accumulate vast financial and organisational resources and these can sustain them through periods in opposition. The KMT notoriously built a giant business empire that ultimately embraced banks, industrial and petrochemical companies, and media conglomerates. Although it eventually liquidated these controversial holdings, the carefully concealed proceeds of these sales ensured that its resource advantage over other parties remained overwhelming.

The party could also rely upon extensive organisational systems, built across decades, which allowed it to re-energise supporters across the country as a whole in the aftermath of defeat.

While the presidency was in opposition hands between 2000 and 2008, the KMT continued to control a big apparatus of deployment and co-option, linking the party to the executive branch of government and big business. It lost office but did not really ever lose power.

There are few reliable lessons to be drawn from the study of politics in other societies. But the experiences of the KMT and PRI, and of dominant parties in Singapore, Japan, India and Malaysia, among others, suggest the inevitable decline of an electorally weakened, or even defeated, ANC cannot be taken for granted. There is no real reason to expect a dominant party that has lost office to disappear. On the contrary, there is every chance it will bounce back.

Butler teaches politics at the University of Cape Town