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What if the DA and the EFF merged?
At first glance, this does sound absurd. The DA and the EFF represent opposite ends of South Africa’s political spectrum. One champions markets and private enterprise. The other calls for nationalisation and radical economic transformation. One appeals largely to liberal constitutionalism. The other thrives on socialist, Fanonian politics.
Their policies are not similar. But they are both trying to solve the same problem. Strip away the rhetoric, and both parties define themselves against the ANC. Both argue that South Africa’s greatest obstacle is not democracy, capitalism or socialism but the ANC itself: its corruption, inability to govern and failure to deliver.
If removing the ANC from power is genuinely the objective, perhaps South Africa’s opposition has been asking itself the wrong question. Instead of asking how to win over another percentage point of voters, perhaps they should be asking why millions of South Africans are choosing not to vote for them at all. That is the real political story.
Every election produces the same headlines about which opposition party gained or lost support. Yet South Africa’s largest political force is neither the ANC nor the DA nor the EFF. It is nonvoters. Millions of South Africans have decided that no political party speaks for them. That should terrify every opposition leader.
Despite two decades of ANC decline, corruption scandals, state capture, collapsing infrastructure, load-shedding and stagnant economic growth, no opposition party has become the natural home for disillusioned ANC voters. Instead, many former ANC supporters simply stay at home. Perhaps people are not rejecting the ANC’s broad ideological positioning. Perhaps they are rejecting the ANC’s execution.
Yet South Africa’s largest political force is neither the ANC nor the DA nor the EFF. It is nonvoters. Millions of South Africans have decided that no political party speaks for them. That should terrify every opposition leader.
The ANC has historically occupied the political centre of South African politics, not the ideological centre in a textbook sense but the centre of the country’s political identity. It combines social welfare with constitutional democracy, transformation with private enterprise, and state intervention with market participation.
Its appeal has never rested solely on policy. It rested on trust. That trust has been destroyed. But destroying trust in the ANC has not automatically created trust in anyone else.
The DA has struggled to convince large sections of the electorate that it understands their aspirations beyond efficient governance. The EFF has struggled to convince many voters that its economic programme would produce stability rather than uncertainty. Each captures a slice of South Africa, but neither captures South Africa itself. That is why the opposition remains fragmented.
Imagine, purely as a thought experiment, a political movement that combined the DA’s emphasis on capable government, clean administration and institutional strength with the EFF’s ability to articulate inequality, exclusion and economic injustice. Would that not look remarkably similar to what the ANC once promised to be? Not today’s ANC; the ANC that people once believed in.
Of course, such a merger is politically impossible. But the thought exposes something much more important. South Africa has a political vacuum.
The ANC is steadily losing legitimacy, yet nobody has emerged as a genuine replacement. Not because opposition parties are too small. Because they remain too narrow. The DA speaks exceptionally well to one South Africa. The EFF speaks exceptionally well to another. Neither speaks convincingly to all of it. Until someone does, the ANC’s decline may continue without producing an alternative governing majority.
The biggest winner will not be another political party; it will be political disengagement.
• Roos is Business Day parliamentary reporter.
