Writing the 2019 Election: It was all rather underwhelming, but revealing nonetheless By Ismail Lagardien
political parties had to take responsibility for the violent competition between their members for political positions and power:The commission recommends that political parties urgently educate their members about democratic practices, especially the universal practice of peaceful political competition as opposed to political intolerance and violent political competition.”
We should assume, in fairness, that those who voted for the EFF are well educated and have some kind of superior logic. How does one explain the rejection ofleftists such as the SRWP? One way to look at it is that the world has changed significantly since the collapse of Soviet communism at the end of the 1980s, and of capitalism more recently.
Maybe the electorate is sufficiently informed to reject a turn to the market fundamentalism represented by the ZACP, and the ossified workerist revolutionaries of the SRWP. This does not help explain how religious parties received more votes. We know that the German fellow would have us believe that religion was “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.
The ANC and DA have, between them, secured at least 75% of the vote . While the EFF, BLF, SRWP would have us return to some austere 20th century ideology, with touches of racial scapegoating, promises and threats of rapine and grand-scale nationalisation of industries, the electorate has by and large rejected them.
There are, of course, very many things that can be squeezed out of the poll. To this writer, the election was rather unsurprising. Or as the kids would say, Meh!
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