Will small parties again be left far behind in Cape metro?

Published Jul 20, 2016

Share

Cape Town - While it is common for much of the focus in the run-up to municipal elections to be on the bigger parties who have large followings and the resources to campaign, smaller political parties are not giving up the fight for representation in the Cape Town city council.

There are more than 20 smaller parties challenging the August 3 elections - six of which each have a single seat in the city council's made up of 221 members.

Since the 2000 elections, the number of smaller parties has grown significantly, but their representation has not.

In that year, with three seats, the United Democratic Movement (UDM) was the most successful of the smaller parties with the fourth highest number of seats in the 200-seat council followed by the Africa Muslim Party (AMP) with two.

The IFP and PAC each had one.

There was a proliferation of minority parties contesting the 2006 elections, and it paid off for them at the polls, with the highest number of smaller parties represented in the 210-member council to date.

The AMP came out tops with three seats, the UDM gained two, followed by one each for the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), PAC, United Independent front (UIF) and the United Party (UP).

But in 2011, the more established smaller parties failed to gain ground, only just hanging on to their seats, with each of them receiving less than 1 percent of the vote.

However, two new small parties managed to make their way into the city council - Al Jama-ah and the Cape Muslim Congress (CMC), both representing the interests of Muslim communities.

They currently each have one seat in the city council, along with the AMP, National Party of SA, PAC, UDM and the FF+.

Senior political science lecturer at Stellenbosch University Dr Collette Schulz-Herzenberg said smaller parties brought diversity to a structure like the metro council, given South Africa’s heterogeneous society.

“In a mixed system with proportional representation they ensure that minority voices come through and that smaller communities have expression in local affairs because the smaller parties represent the desires and needs of specific communities,” she said. But smaller parties also had a negative impact - fragmenting the strength of the opposition.

With voters given more voting options, bigger opposition parties bore the brunt of losing out to smaller, minority parties.

Schulz-Herzenberg suggested the South African political system imposed a threshold of around 2 percent before a small party can earn a seat in a municipal council.

In 2011, the NPSA garnered the most number of votes (11 756) of the smaller parties who have a seat in the metro, but the number of votes only represented 1.16 percent of the electorate.

With almost three times the number of votes than the FF+ which attained the least number of votes of the minority parties in Cape Town, they both have one seat in the council.

“In a dominant party system, we want to strengthen the opposition. If there is a threshold, voters will be less likely to waste their vote on a party that is not likely to get a seat,” she said.

Bigger political parties like the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) and Cope also lost out to the DA and ANC in 2011, with representation that can also best be described as a minority.

From seven seats in 2006, the ACDP now has three, while Cope only managed to secure the same number of seats in their first municipal election in 2011.

In this election, there will be 10 more seats up for grabs in the metro.

Related Topics: