2019 ELECTIONS: Back to the future: Tony Leon and Thabo Mbeki on the campaign trail By Carien Du Plessis carienduplessis
It’s been at least a decade since Tony Leon and Thabo Mbeki have been on the campaign trail, but times have changed. With about two weeks to an election riddled with some new uncertainties in both their parties, the former leaders are back in politics, if only for a few days.and coining it from doing PR for Cape Town’s “day zero”, while Mbeki has the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and he’s been doing work as an elder on the continent. Occasionally he broke his silence to criticise the ANC of Jacob Zuma.
At the meeting Leon went on a trip down memory lane to the 1989 elections, when he first became an MP for the Democratic Party, saying that then-president FW de Klerk had to make a choice about taking the party down the right political path — either by opening it up by unbanning the ANC and releasing Nelson Mandela, or by going the other way. He chose the former.Here’s the thing.
ANC supporters here are less dependent on party patronage than in some of the rural provinces, and more sensitive to bad decisions by the governing party that have knock-on effects on the economy. This makes them a fickle audience. Mbeki is a reminder of an era where economic growth was at least on some kind of a positive track.
The DA’s support for black economic empowerment and a perceived silence on issues such as farm murders, have seen voters deserting it for the Freedom Front Plus in a by-election in Krugersdorp in 2018. In the Western Cape,during a by-election earlier in 2019. Both by-elections came as a wake-up call for the DA, and the trends were borne out in its polling too.
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