An appeal beyond apartheid political identities is the route to political dominance

The decline of the ANC, the only political movement so far to try to appeal to people from all parts of our society, is revealing all of the political identities that still define our politics.

To a large extent these are parties based on apartheid identities.

Whether it’s the Freedom Front Plus, the IFP, the Patriotic Alliance, MK or the ANC and the DA themselves, our politics is all about the identities of the past.

Considering that people everywhere often vote for a person who makes them feel good about themselves, this is not surprising.

Read more: SA and the tension between populism and constitutionalism 

The pull of identity politics is no different here from what has happened in Brazil or the US or the UK.

However, for the first time we are seeing parties appealing to an identity that was not defined by apartheid.

Beyond identity politics

The first of these was ActionSA, which was able to win support from black and white voters in 2021. It was followed by Rise Mzansi and Build One South Africa in the 2024 elections.

While it is a common South African political syndrome (particularly among members of the commentariat – like myself) to find a new movement seductive, the importance of this should not be overstated.

Together they have won enough support to have just 10 MPs (ActionSA has six, Bosa and Rise Mzansi two each).

That said, the fact that they have been able to find support and create a constituency does suggest that voters are looking for something new. As many former ANC voters are likely to be looking for alternatives, there may now be room for them to grow.

To do that they need to craft a message that is stronger than the pull of identity politics. Considering this is largely created by our racialised inequality, this form of politics will have a very strong pull for a very long time.

This means these parties may well need to focus on the future, rather than the present and the past.

This also means that every big decision these parties make runs the risk of creating divisions that could lead to them splitting.

Read more: From MK to ActionSA to the Patriotic Alliance, these are South Africa’s fiefdom-like political structures

This might well explain why none of these parties has yet had proper leadership elections. When they finally do have leadership conferences attended by large numbers of their members they might find that tensions around identities come to the surface.

The past 10 years have seen a high level of churn, where a political party is started and then either disappears or splits. These parties have to avoid this fate themselves. And that will require very careful management by their current leaders.

The leadership question

One of the biggest questions they face is whether they should continue to operate separately or merge.

The first reports that possible merger talks were under way emerged last week, suggesting Patricia de Lille’s Good party was part of the talks.

Up until now Good has appeared to really be one of a profusion of one-person parties in our politics. It is, after all, the second party formed by De Lille.

Considering that she has already had a long career and barely scraped into Parliament, she is unlikely to continue much longer. This means the party’s other main leader, Brett Herron, may have no political future, unless he is able to encourage such a merger with Good as a part of it.

Read more: Maimane, Mashaba and Zibi test waters for centrist party merger in 2026 polls

But the biggest problem these parties will face is who will lead any new entity.

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba has poured a large amount of resources and energy into his party, and is the most established. It is unlikely that he would accept the leadership of anyone else.

And Bosa leader Mmusi Maimane and Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi might be worried that their groups would just be subsumed into ActionSA. 

Any talks about a merger might well founder on this issue.

It is also worth examining the historical tides against which these groups are swimming.

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The surge in identity populism created to a large extent by the development of social media has overtaken many countries. Places as diverse and different as Brazil, Italy, the UK and the US have all succumbed. These are countries that are much more homogenous than ours; their levels of economic inequality are much lower. This means that identity populism will remain a very strong force in our society.

But some countries, like Brazil and the UK, do appear to have recovered. They have elected centrist moderates after a period of electing right-wing identity populists.

Winning broad support

In one way, these new South African parties may be doing something other parties are not – pursuing the only route that exists to true political dominance in this country.

Up until now the party that has probably managed to get the highest proportion of votes through an ethnic appeal is MK. It is obviously appealing to Zulus. It was able to obtain 14% of the vote in the 2024 elections. Even if a party was to emerge that could win more votes than that from this group, it would still only be able to win about 25% of the vote (the last census, as contested as it is, suggests that about 24.4% of people in South Africa speak Zulu as their home language).

This means that to do better than that you have to broaden your support.

The main reason for this is our current voting system of proportional representation. It forces parties to attract votes from more than one group.

Even in this age of coalitions it would seem that to lead a coalition you would need to appeal to more than one group.

Of course, we are not just defined by our ethnic identities – parties like the EFF and perhaps the SACP obviously appeal across ethnic lines, and along the lines of ideology. But even they would have to craft a message that appealed to people of different classes to get to a point where they could lead a national coalition.

This suggests that parties like Rise Mzansi, Bosa and Good might well be the first that we have seen to start this process of appealing to a diverse cross-section of our people.

There is a long road ahead for these new parties if they want to grow their support, with very difficult decisions to make. And while they are small now, their main significance is probably that they are the first to try something new in our politics.

Something that could one day become very important. DM