Proposed legislation to curb the influence of marginal parties in municipal government by setting vote-share thresholds appears to have hit a wall.
The ANC and the DA both want to introduce a 1% threshold, the minimum share of the vote a party would need before it could gain a seat on the council. They argue that tiny parties too often hold the balance of power in municipalities despite having nearly invisible support.
But the two big parties differ over another amendment to the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill that the ANC is seeking to introduce, and this has proved a dealbreaker.
The DA has rejected the ANC amendment that seeks to introduce a collective executive system for hung councils in which no single party has an absolute majority and coalitions have to be formed. The DA argues that scrapping the executive mayor system in hung councils would reduce mayors to impotent “ribbon cutters”.
Failure to reach agreement on the bill will perpetuate the status quo, where minuscule parties play a disproportionate role in deciding the balance of power in hung councils, often indulging in unscrupulous machinations.
An astonishing number of parties would be barred from municipal councils by even a 1% threshold. In the City of Joburg, if such a threshold had been in place ahead of the 2021 elections, 11 of the 19 parties now represented would be out in the cold. One of them would be Al Jama-ah, which scraped together only 0.95% of the vote — yet was able to name two successive mayors. Their tenures had a disastrous effect on the running of the city.
The same is true of Ekurhuleni, Cape Town, Tshwane and eThekwini, where a 1% threshold would have reduced the number of parties in the council by 50% or more.
Thresholds have been under discussion within the GNU. Not surprisingly, the smaller parties, including those in the GNU, have rejected the notion as undemocratic. GOOD’s Brett Herron has described thresholds as “an affront to the constitution”, saying they infringe on the rights of citizens to form political parties and would dissuade voters from backing a smaller party.
DA federal council chair Helen Zille tells the FM that thresholds are crucial to the effective functioning of municipalities in the coalition era, now firmly entrenched in South Africa.
“Let’s say you are trying to get rid of corruption in a municipal unit, and somebody goes to a small party and says: ‘Listen, I voted for you, and I’m telling you, stop the DA from doing what they’re doing.’
“I mean, there’s always someone who gets to someone in a nine-party coalition, and that can effectively stop you. A party with 0.2% across the whole of Joburg then can stop a party that is the biggest by far from doing anything, because they’ve got the balance of power.”
A party with 0.2% across the whole of Joburg then can stop a party that is the biggest by far from doing anything, because they’ve got the balance of power
— Helen Zille
Referring to Al Jama-ah, Zille says: “It’s not democratic to have somebody being an executive mayor in a city of 6-million people when they’ve got so few votes. No-one can tell me that’s a democratic outcome.”
She notes that all countries with proportional representation systems have a threshold: in Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic it is 5%; in Sweden, Austria, Israel, Greece and Spain it varies between 3% and 4%.
“You’ve got to be a serious player before you can influence the government or bring it down,” says Zille, “and before you can demand to be the mayor.”
Zille says the DA cannot support the Municipal Structures Amendment Bill unless the ANC abandons its proposal for a collective executive in hung councils.
“If you look at the composition of an executive committee, it would have to be put together proportionately. So even if we’re the biggest party by quite a margin, but we don’t get 50%, the other parties in the executive committee will put together 50%-plus, and they could outvote us on every single issue.
“You could win the election and lose the government. In the places where we have had experience of the executive committee system, it really hasn’t worked.”
Some of the parties that received a relatively small percentage of the vote in previous elections are planning for the possibility of a threshold being introduced before or after the upcoming local government election.
Songezo Zibi’s Rise Mzansi, Mmusi Maimane’s Build One South Africa and GOOD are set to contest the election under one banner, Unite for Change. ActionSA has been traversing the country, absorbing independent councillors and small parties under its “green umbrella”.
ActionSA chair Michael Beaumont tells the FM the strategy has been yielding positive results. The party won its first by-election in the Ramotshere Moiloa municipality in North West in October, unseating the ANC in one of its rural strongholds. The previous month, in ward 130 in Joburg, the party almost tripled its support to 22.6%, behind only the ANC.
Beaumont says ActionSA is not overly concerned about thresholds. “This is the problem the DA and the ANC have. They want it, but nobody else does. All those other parties in the GNU will protest and/or drop out. They are violently against it because it’s an existential threat to them.
“We haven’t ventilated the issue in ActionSA. There are probably different opinions on it, but we’re very confident that wherever we contest, we will more than successfully obtain any threshold. There’s no point for us to contest where we can’t get more than 1%,” he says.
The ANC in Ekurhuleni supports the introduction of thresholds and dismisses the argument that it limits democratic expression. It endured a term with a mayor from the African Independent Congress (which won 1.29% of the vote in 2021), who was imposed by the party’s provincial leadership.
“Our democracy is such that it embraces multiparty representation,” says Ekurhuleni regional secretary Jongizizwe Dlabathi. “So even if we set that threshold of 1%, it will not necessarily undermine the principle of a multiparty democracy.” He says smaller parties have historically put their own interests first, ignoring what is best for residents.
Amid the debate over a threshold, international practice seems to indicate that 1% would be too low anyway. In South Africa, setting the bar so low would still allow several parties with minimal support to get seats on councils.One percent may be a low minimal cut off point, but it would be a start.
*Marrian is a political analyst at the Bureau for Economic Research
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