Extremist Political Parties: A View from South Africa

Laurence Caromba

Centre for International Political Studies (CiPS)

University of Pretoria

Introduction

In May 2008, a series of xenophobic riots took place in South Africa. Beginning in the township of

Alexandra, the wave of violence rapidly spread throughout the province of Gauteng. These riots

created an acute social crisis, and had tragic humanitarian consequences. From a political science

perspective, however, they also raised several interesting questions. Given the hardened anti-

immigrant sentiment that evidently exists among segments of the South African population, why has

the popular anti-immigrant discourse not been reflected in the political arena? Why have South

African political parties, unlike certain parties in Europe, not attempted to exploit anti-immigrant

sentiment in order to win votes? Broadly speaking, why has the rise of xenophobia not been

accompanied by the rise of extremist political parties?

Extremist political parties are a perennial cause for concern, and a frequent object of academic

interest. During the Cold War, interest focussed on extremist parties of the left, such as communist

parties. In the post-Cold War era, attention has shifted to parties of the extreme right, whose success

in the 1990s caught many observers by surprise. Scholars of comparative politics have devoted great

energy to explaining the causes of extreme party formation and success on a systemic and individual

level.

In South Africa, however, extremist parties have been largely absent from the political scene.

Extremist parties do exist in South Africa, as do the underlying conditions that typically lead to

extremist party success. However, South African extremist parties have been unable to translate these

advantages into electoral support. Within the South African context, therefore, the most interesting

questions in response to extremist parties are negative. Why have extremist parties on the left and

right ends of the political spectrum been unable to win a significant share of the vote? How has South

Africa managed to avoid extremist party success in a situation where the decks are seemingly stacked

in their favour? Is the absence of extremist parties due to historical factors or policy choices? Most

importantly, the South African case raises the question of whether extremist parties cause political

instability, and whether they are bad for democracy in a normative sense. In the popular media, the

success of extremist parties is generally seen as an unalloyed negative. However, the South African

example indicate provides some evidence that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the absence of

extremist parties in some situations may have harmful unintended consequences.

Background

Powell (1986:359) suggests that extremist parties can be defined by various traits, including their

advocacy of “anti-system” viewpoints, their ideological placement at the extreme ends of the left-right

scale, and their status as an outlet for those are alienated from the democratic process. Each approach

has its own merits and problems. Jackman & Volpert (1992:509) use an approach in which parties are

ranked on a left-right scale, and those parties which diverge sufficiently from the mean are defined as

“extremist”. This approach has the advantage of allowing the use of advanced quantitative analysis,

but it tends to break down in countries with more than one axis of political competition, and depends

on subjective analyses of where to rank parties on the scale and where to draw the line that divides

“extremist” parties from the rest. The latter problem can be partially alleviated by sampling the

opinions of numerous experts in order to create the scale (Castle & Mair 1984:73), but such a scale

does not exist for South African parties. Furthermore, this “divergence” model of extremism may also

complicate comparisons across states, since the location of the political centre, as well as the range of

political opinion, tends to differ considerably from one state to another.

For this reason, I shall use the attribute model, in which extremist parties are defined as having

particular characteristics. Following the example of Powell (1982: 233-234,273-274) and Duch and

Gibson (1992:260-261), I shall define as “extremist” parties which have one of the following

attributes: a) a well-developed non-democratic ideology, b) a desire to fundamentally alter the borders

of the state, or c) a history of fomenting protest, alienation and distrust of the existing political system.

To this, I would add a fourth attribute: an intention to severely curtail the rights of other groups in

society – whether they are racial minorities, legal immigrants, “class enemies”, homosexuals, or any

other group – in a manner that is inconsistent with the constitutional norms of the state. This leaves us

with a relatively broad definition of extremism that encompasses parties of both the extreme right and

the extreme left.

The success of extremist parties has long been a cause for concern. During the Cold War, Western

political scientists worried about the strength of left-wing parties such as the Italian Communist Party,

which claimed more than 1.3 million members at the height of its strength (Benjamin & Kautsky

1968:122). Since 1991, attention has tended to focus more on parties of the extreme right, largely due

to a series of unexpected successes and electoral upsets by far-right parties. In 1989, Germany’s far-

right Republikaner party won 7.1% of the votes cast for the European Parliamant (Husbands

1991:86). In 1994, the far-right Italian National Alliance Party was strong enough at the polls to

ensure a position in Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet (Jackman & Volpert 1996:502). The Austrian

Freedom Party won 27.6% of the vote in European parliamentary elections in 1996 (Lee 1999:370),

and placed second in 1999 parliamentary elections, allowing it to form a governing coalition with the

centre-right People’s Party (Black 2000). The British National Party won 4.9% of the votes in the

2004 European Parliament elections, and has become “the most successful far-right party in British

history” (Goowin 2007:241). In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front made it into the second

round of the 2002 French presidential election with 16.86% of the vote (Champeaux 2007). Belgium

is home to arguably the most successful extremist party in Europe: Vlaams Belang, composed of

Flemish ultranationalists. Vlaams Belang has increased its support over successive elections, and

became the strongest party in Flanders after the 2004 elections, in which it won nearly a quarter of the

vote (Smith 2005). Although these parties are not identical, and differ from each other in several

important respects, it is possible to identify several common ideological principles that most of these

parties share, including nationalism, hostility to immigrants and immigration, economic populism

(including protectionism and other anti-globalisation measures), and social conservatism on issues

such as gay rights and feminism.

The extent to which these parties pose a genuine danger to democracy is a matter of debate. Certainly,

the “threat” of extremist parties has sometimes been the subject of exaggeration and hyperbole in the

popular media. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine any scenario in which the BNP, National Front

or German NDP end up governing their respective countries. Excepting the Austrian Freedom Party,

no extremist party in Europe has ever demonstrated the ability to win a majority or even a plurality of

the vote. By contrast, there are large majorities in every country opposing them, such as the coalition

of conservatives, socialists and leftists that gave Jacques Chirac an overwhelming 82.21% of the vote

when he faced Le Pen in 2002. While extremist parties have sometimes enjoyed electoral upsets, these

tend to be temporary spikes rather than lasting patterns. With the exception of Vlaams Belang,

extremist parties have been unable to capitalise on their success by establishing solid bases of support.

Vlaams Belang’s success in this respect is unusual, and stems from ethnic tensions in Belgium in

addition to broader continental issue such European integration and Islamic immigration.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of extremist parties altogether. In a

broad sense, the limited success of extremist parties nevertheless represents a challenge to the liberal-

democratic consensus that defies the “end of ideology” predicted by Fukuyama (1992), Bell (1960),

and others. Many commentators have argued, not unreasonably, that the level of support enjoyed by

extremist parties is inversely proportional to the health of the political system itself. Extremist party

success is frequently indicative of darker underlying trends, such as voter alienation (Betz 1993:676)

and the revival of ethnonationalism documented in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (Muller 2008). In

a narrower sense, extremist parties can exert an influence without participating directly in

government, by altering the range of acceptable policy options and forcing mainstream parties to

adopt their policies in order to prevent losing votes. For these reasons, mainstream politicians have

attempted to marginalise extremist parties using measures such as the cordon sanitaire, an informal

agreement among mainstream parties to repudiate coalitions with extremists.

The South African Party System

The factors that lead to extremist party success are a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. Jackman and

Volpert (1996) find a positive correlation between extremist party success and unemployment,

electoral proportionality and multipartyism. Knigge (1998) finds a correlation between right-wing

party support, voter disenchantment and rising immigration. Abedi (2002) argues that lack of political

space between mainstream parties of the centre-left and centre-right tends to encourage anti-

establishment parties on both extremes of the spectrum. Mayer and Perrineau (1992) find an inverse

correlation between far-right support and education among French voters. Stöss (1991:212-213)

argues that right-wing extremism is driven by economic insecurity, and Krejc (1991:12) partially

attributes extremist party success to ethnic divisions in society, and the extent to which ethnic groups

must compete for scarce economic resources such as housing and jobs.

Clearly, extremist party success is a complex issue with multiple causes. Adding to the confusion,

Knigge (1998:266) finds no correlation between unemployment and right-wing party support, and

Arzheimer and Carter (2006:434) find a negative correlation between unemployment and extreme

right voting. Both studies contradict the earlier research of Jackman and Volpert (1996:516), though

Arzheimer and Carter’s study treats the individual voter rather than the state as the unit of analysis

and is restricted to a relatively small sample of countries where extreme-right support is

comparatively strong, which may account for the discrepancy. Furthermore, the majority of these

studies (with the exception of Abedi) focus on the extreme right rather than extremist parties in

general, and all of them restrict themselves to European states. For these reasons, a definitive study of

the factors that correlate with overall extremist party success has yet to be undertaken.

Nevertheless, the existing research is sufficient to establish a list of criteria that have either been

hypothesised to increase the likelihood of extremist party success, or have been found to do so in

specific circumstances. These factors are: an electoral system with a high degree of proportionality; a

tendency towards multipartyism; a high percentage of uneducated voters; mass immigration;

unemployment and other socioeconomic problems; voter alienation; and ethnic or racial tensions.

When considering the political situation in South Africa, what is most striking is the extent to which

all of these conditions are present. In terms of the electoral system, Jackman and Volpert (1992:518-

519) argue that while “electoral proportionality is sometimes offered as the guiding principle of

electoral systems, a value to be maximized above all others”, the “recent electoral resurgence of

parties on the extreme right is a vivid reminder that proportionality is not without its costs”. If this

principle holds true, South African should be paying high costs indeed. Its electoral system was

designed to give small, non-mainstream and possibly extremist parties a voice, and consists of pure

proportional representation with no threshold to enter parliament. As Duverger’s (1954) hypothesis

would predict, this has encouraged multipartyism: the 2004 elections saw participation by 21 parties,

16 of which received enough votes to be represented in parliament. (This number was reduced to 15

following the September 2007 floor-crossing period [SA Parliament 2007].) In theory, this

combination of proportionality and multipartyism should lower the cost to entry for political

entrepreneurs, encouraging charismatic and possibly extremist leaders to participate in party politics.

Low levels of education are often seen as a predictor of extremist party support, either because highly-

educated voters have rational, self-interested reasons to oppose extremist parties, or because highly-

educated voters have been heavily socialised into a liberal political culture (Arzheimer and Carter

2006:421). This would seem to make South Africa fertile ground for extremist parties, since the South

African education system continues to suffer from years of neglect during the apartheid period.

According to the World Bank (2000), South Africans aged 15 and higher (a group that does not

precisely correspond with the voting-age population, but is close enough to be analytically useful) had

an average of 6.14 years of formal education: somewhat higher than the average for developing

countries, but significantly lower than the average for “advanced countries” (9.76 years) and ex-

communist “transitional economies” (9.68 years).

Widespread immigration is another factor which is both associated with extremist party support and

present in South Africa. As the most prosperous state on the African continent, South Africa has

attracted large numbers of immigrants who often enter the country illegally. Judging the precise

number of illegal immigrants in the country is inherently difficult due to the clandestine nature of this

form of migration, but Solomon (2000) has estimated that there are probably between 2.5 million and

4.1 million illegal immigrants based on surveys and the number of deportations. Since then, this

figure has probably increased further due to the ongoing political and economic instability in

Zimbabwe, which by some estimates has seen roughly 3 million Zimbabweans flee to South Africa

(Sokwanele 2007). This wave of illegal immigration has been accompanied by rising xenophobia and

widespread anti-immigrant sentiment. The well-publicised xenophobic riots of May 2008, in which

immigrants were beaten, raped and burned, are merely the latest and most dramatic expression of this

problem. In April 2008 anti-immigrant violence raged for three consecutive days in Mamelodi, as

anti-immigrant groups destroyed immigrant-owned homes and businesses, and burned a 9-year old

girl to death. The violence prompted calls by foreigners to send in the army to maintain order (Hosken

2008). A month before that, roughly 50 immigrants were driven out of Worcester by a local mob

(Breytenbach 2008). The increasing frequency and severity of xenophobic incidents is indicative of

increasingly widespread hostility to immigrants and frustration with the inability of the state to control

illegal immigration, yet popular anti-immigrant sentiment has not been translated into a well-

organised nativist political movement.

Anti-immigrant sentiment is exacerbated by the broader socio-economic problems facing the country,

including very high rates of unemployment. South Africa’s official unemployment rate currently

stands at 23% (Statistics South Africa 2007). However, the official methodology excludes

“discouraged work seekers” (people who have given up on finding jobs) from the pool of

unemployed, indicating that the true unemployment rate is probably substantially higher. A more

relevant statistic may be the “labour force participation rate”, which stands at a meagre 56.5%. The

lack of low-skill jobs is coupled with a very high level of inequality: according to the Economic

Policy Institute (2006), South Africa’s gini coefficient stood at 0.63 as of 2006. This means that South

Africa’s economy is more unequal than Brazil’s, and possibly more unequal than any other country in

the world. Unemployment and inequality on this level has the potential to be socially destabilising,

and drive voters to seek radical solutions from parties on the extreme left and right.

In terms of political factors, it is significant that although many South Africans remain

enthusiastically involved in the political process, voter alienation and disenchantment with the

available political choices is also an increasing trend. In the 2004 general elections, only 58% of

eligible voters turned out to vote, as opposed to 85% ten years earlier. Voter apathy is particular high

among the youth: in the 18-25 demographic, only 46% of South Africans are registered to vote, and

many of those do not turn out. Admittedly, many industrialised and developed countries have

similarly low turnout, which arguably represents a general sense of satisfaction with the status quo.

However, voter satisfaction is unlikely explain the situation in South Africa, where many voters are

unhappy with the government’s seeming inability to tackle problems such as unemployment, crime,

AIDS, corruption, inequality and electricity shortages. The current situation is best explained, not by

contentment with the status quo, but by widespread distrust in political institutions. This view is

supported by the HSRC (2008), which found sharply declining trust in public institutions between

2004 and 2007. Only 52% of respondents expressed trust in national government, 46% expressed

confidence in parliament, and a mere 34% say they trust local government. This lack of confidence is

unsurprising, given that 2007 saw factionalism and infighting within the ruling African National

Congress (ANC), a corruption scandal surrounding the national police commissioner, accusations that

the presidency was sidelining parliament, and a public spat between the ANC and leading jurists.

Significantly, “political parties” ranked lower than any other institution on the list, with a paltry 27%

of respondents saying they “trust” or “strongly trust” political parties. Even the police, which is

widely derided for its corruption and inability to tackle the country’s crime problem, received higher

positive ratings. These figures suggest that many voters are unhappy with the both the political status

quo and the alternatives on offer, potentially creating political space on the margins where extremist

parties could successfully compete.

Finally, South Africa has certain unique features which, while not usually cited as a general cause of

extremism, might potentially make it more vulnerable to extremist party success. Despite the passage

of 14 years since the formal end of apartheid, South Africa remains a period of “long transition”, in

which many of the economic and social structures of the past remain. Seekings (2008) has pointed out

the relatively limited racial integration that has occurred since 1994, and the country’s persistent

cultural divisions along racial and ethnic lines. South Africans have yet to find common agreement on

the “national question”, and many of the country’s most bitter political conflicts revolve around issues

of identity, such as the names of towns and places, or the racial composition of its sports teams, rather

than the distribution of scarce resources. Similarly, the country’s apartheid-era political geography

remains largely intact. Many South Africans still live in racial and linguistic ghettoes, in which an

individual can live most of their life without having to socialise with people from outside their own

group. The experience of other countries which have similar social cleavages, such as Belgium,

suggests that an atmosphere of ethnic and cultural division is conducive to the success of extremist

parties.

The Failure of Extremist Parties in South Africa

Given the conditions above, South Africa should be accommodating territory for extremist parties. It

is a country with deep ethnic and cultural divisions, severe socioeconomic problems, and strong anti-

immigrant sentiment. It is also a country in which large portions of the electorate are alienated from

the political process and from mainstream political parties, and the obstacles preventing political

entrepreneurs from entering the market are comparatively small. In concert, we might expect these

conditions to encourage populist extremists to enter the political fray, and allow them to win a

significant share of the vote. In practice, the reverse has occurred. No new extremist parties have been

successfully launched, while pre-existing extremist parties and ethnic parties have also seen their

share of the vote decline. Various political entrepreneurs have entered party politics, but few have

offered an extremist platform, and all have met with failure.

For the purposes of this analysis, I shall classify South African parties into three groups: extremist

parties, “ethnic” parties, and “mainstream” parties. Extremist parties are defined earlier in this paper,

while “ethnic” parties (Van Cott 2003:3) are defined as political parties which are organised around

ethnic cleavages, draw votes predominantly from a single ethnic or cultural group, and view their own

mission as the advocacy for their group’s interests rather than competing in elections with the serious

intent to win and govern the state. There may be considerable overlap between ethnic parties and

extremist parties, as extremist parties (especially those on the far-right) frequently define themselves

in ethnic terms. They are, however, separate concepts. Extremist parties (especially those on the far-

left) may cut across ethnic divides by appealing to class or other social cleavages; conversely, genuine

ethnic parties may have non-radical goals. The purpose of including ethnic parties in this study is not

to conflate them with extremist parties, but to provide an holistic overview of the South African party

system. Finally, “mainstream” parties are be defined as parties that compete across the country and

attempt to win votes from multiple ethnic groups in an effort to win elections and govern.

By this definition, there are only two mainstream parties in the current South African system: the

ruling ANC, and the official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). Ethnic parties in the current

parliament include the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and Minority Front, which represent the interests

of Zulus and Indians respectively. The far-right Freedom Front Plus (FF+) can be considered both an

ethnic party for its advocacy of Afrikaner interests, and an extremist party for its policy advocacy of

creating a de facto independent Afrikaner state in the Northern Cape. Other extremist parties in

parliament include the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and Azanian People's Organisation (AZAPO),

far-left parties that advocate the abolition of the capitalist state. (The PAC has also occasionally

advocated populist right-wing ideas, such as its 1999 call for the amputation of criminals’ limbs

[Daily Dispatch 1999].) Another far-left party, the Socialist Party of Azania, competed in the 2004

elections but failed to achieve the 0.25% necessary to win a single seat in parliament. It must be

stressed that not every party in the South African system falls into these three categories. Oddities

abound in the South African party system, including single-issue parties, regional parties, religious

parties, personality-driven parties, and various combinations thereof. For the most part, these groups

are irrelevant to our analysis, and can be safely ignored.

Despite the failure of political entrepreneurs to create new extremist parties, the presence of AZAPO,

the FF+ and others demonstrate that South Africans wishing to vote for extremist policies have

several alternatives available. However, the performance of these parties in elections has been

disastrous, and has trended downwards over time. In 1994, the Freedom Front won 2.17% of the vote,

but this was reduced to a paltry 0.8% in 1999 and 0.89% in 2004 (IEC 2008). Another far-right party,

the AEB, won 0.29% in 1999 before merging with the Freedom Front in 2003. The PAC won 1.24%

in 1994, before falling to 0.71% in 1999 and 0.73% in 2004. AZAPO increased its share from 0.17%

in 1999 to 0.25% in 2004, but its support remains miniscule.

Pure ethnic parties have seen a similar decline, albeit from a higher baseline. The most important

ethnic party in South Africa – the IFP – started off with 10.53% of the vote in the 1994 elections, but

declined to 8.58% in 1999 and 6.97 % in 2004. The only other ethnic party in parliament – the

Minority Front – has remained at approximately the 0.3% point.

The only parties to have significantly increased their share of the vote since 1994 are the mainstream

parties, the ANC and the DA. The ANC has risen from 62.65% in 1994 to 69.69% in 2004, while the

DA has risen from 1.73% to 12.37% over the same period. In recent years, both of organisations that

have made a concerted effort to transform themselves into modern political parties in the Western

model, and while they sharply disagree with each other on many issues – as one would expect given

their divergent ideological worldviews – both are identified to with the political centre. The ANC and

the DA both draw the majority of their support from their respective racial bases, and the DA in

particular could not be called a true “national” party due to its reliance on white voters for support.

However, the DA is “mainstream” in the sense that it presents a case for itself as an alternative

government, habitually creates alternative policies to the government (such the party’s annual

alternative budget), and competes for votes across the country with varying degrees of success.

Certainly, the DA’s lack of black support does not reflect any lack of desire on the DA’s part to win

over black voters; something which distinguishes it from parties such as the FF+.

Cumulatively, these results demonstrate consistently poor performance by extremist parties. Extremist

parties in these elections won 3.42% in the transitional 1994 elections, while ethnic parties won

10.61%. By 1999, the number of extremist parties had increased from two to five, but their combined

share of the vote had dropped to 2.03%, while pure ethnic parties dropped to 8.88%. In 2004, the two

mainstream parties won a total of 82.06% of the vote, while pure ethnic parties won 7.32% and

extremist parties (including the FF+) won 1.97% (IEC 2008). Extremist parties during this period

have universally faced declining voter support and diminishing influence.

Explaining the South African Situation

Why have extremist parties failed so dramatically to win votes in South Africa? Answering this

question definitively will require empirical research of voter motivation. In the absence of such

research, however, we may speculate on several possible answers.

First, the weakness of extremist parties may simply be a reflection of the weakness of opposition

politics in general. As several authors (Brooks 2004, Piper 2004) have pointed out, South Africa is a

dominant party system in which opposition parties face significant obstacles when attempting to

compete with the ANC. This dominant-party system has arisen from several factors, including the

ANC’s historical cachet as a liberation movement, the party’s record in office, and racial voting

patterns. With respect to the last factor, numerous authors, including Brooks (2004:112,115) and

Schoeman and Puttergil (2006:167) have pointed out voting behaviour in South Africa tends to

correlate closely with race, which is advantageous to the ANC as the party most clearly identified

with the interests of the black majority. By coupling this built-in advantage with effective

campaigning strategies, plentiful financial resources (Robinson & Brummer 2006:17-21) and a record

of consistent economic growth under its leadership, the ANC has been able to consistently increase its

share of the vote from one election to the next. In the 2004 general election, the ANC won nearly 70%

of the vote, while opposition parties, with the exception of the DA and IFP, remained stuck below

2.5%. Thus extremist parties may simply have suffered from the same problem that afflicts all

opposition parties in the system: the inherent difficulties in competing with the ANC.

Ultimately, this explanation is unsatisfying, for several reasons. First, to ascribe the absence of

extremist parties solely to the dominance of the ANC is to commit the fallacy of affirming the

consequent: the fact that the ANC has not yet been successfully challenged does not mean that there is

no combination of policies and proposals that could challenge the ANC, and it is at least plausible that

an “extremist” platform could be such a combination. This explanation also ignores the declining rate

of voter participation, which has caused the ANC’s support to decline in absolute terms by roughly

1.3 million votes between 1994 and 2004, a period in which South Africa’s population increased from

approximately 40.4 million (Chimere 1995:3) to approximately 47.4 million (Statistics South Africa

2007:1). This suggests that a significant number of voters have become disenchanted with the ruling

party.

Secondly, there is no inherent contradiction between an ANC-dominated electoral system and

extremist party success on the margins. Arzheimer and Carter (2006:434) have found that voters are

more likely to support extremist parties when their political systems are ruled by grand coalitions, and

while the dynamics of grand coalition-based systems and dominant party-based systems are very

different, this does demonstrate the ability of extremist parties to succeed in the margins of systems

where the likelihood of actually winning an election is very small. (In addition, dominant party

systems and systems dominated by grand coalitions certain similar characteristics, such as the

relatively static nature of the political elite, which may drive voters toward extremists.) Thus the

dominance of the ANC is not a sufficient explanation for the overall lack of extremist party success,

and certainly does not explain why extremist parties at the margins (such as the FF+) have been

overtaken by parties that are ideologically mainstream (such as the DA).

Alternatively, South Africa’s apartheid history, followed by the nation-building narrative of the

Mandela era, may have contributed to a cultural climate that is not conducive to extremist party

success. Overt racism has become socially stigmatised, which may in turn have undercut extremist

parties by discrediting any set of political ideas that is built upon a foundation of bigotry. These

liberal cultural attitudes are particularly prevalent among South Africa’s elites, who have largely

come to consider xenophobia morally equivalent to apartheid, and have drawn comparisons between

anti-immigrant sentiment and “traditional” forms of anti-black racism. The Gauteng ANC has

released a statement asserting that “Xenophobia is no different from the racism of apartheid. In the

same manner that we fought against racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination, we must fight

against the hatred of foreign nationals.” (The Citizen 2008) Similar sentiments were voiced by various

NGOs such Lawyers for Human Rights, PASSOP, the SA National Civics Organisaation, the SA

Jewish Board of Deputies and Anglican Archbishop Thabo Makgoba. The Vice-Chancellor of

Witwatersrand University has stated that the “memory of apartheid as an instrument of social

exclusion should strongly warn us against all forms of division and exclusion, including the

xenophobia that we are presently witnessing” (The Times 2008).

However, it is difficult to gauge the precise impact of the elite consensus against bigotry. If the

consensus has indeed trickled down to mainstream voters, it may have reduced the strategic utility

that political parties gain by appealing to anti-immigrant sentiments. However, the recent waves of

xenophobic violence in South Africa, which continued despite the pleas of elites, demonstrates that

there are substantial segments of the population who have not bought into the elite consensus, and

would potentially be open to supporting extremist parties. A more plausible explanation is that the

elite consensus has affected the actions of political party leaders directly. According to this view,

party leaders, who are themselves members of the political elite, have been sufficiently inculcated

with tolerant values that they will voluntarily refrain from pandering to bigoted and xenophobic

voters. However, this view of party leaders as moral agents is at odds with the more “rational” and

economistic view, in which party leaders are seen as self-interested actors whose primary goal is to

maximise their share of the vote.

The historical explanation holds more weight if we shift the analysis from extremist parties to ethnic

parties. Ironically, South Africa’s apartheid history may have helped to forestall the success of ethnic

parties by diminishing the salience of ethnic nationalism among voters. By following a rigorous

policy of state-enforced racial discrimination for six decades, South Africa’s apartheid-era leaders

helped to ensure that race, rather than ethnicity, would be the most important cleavage in South

African politics for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that ethnicity is completely irrelevant:

the whites-only elections of the apartheid era revolved around ethnic divisions between English and

Afrikaans speakers, and although the majority of white voters no longer vote along ethnic lines, the

legacy of this division remains in the form of several “Afrikaner” parties. Similarly, the apartheid

government tried with mixed success to drive a wedge been Zulus (the largest ethnic group in South

Africa) and the rest of the black population, a tactic that resulted severe ethnic violence between 1991

and the 1994 election. Nevertheless, race has always been more important social division than

ethnicity, and this trend accelerated in the post-apartheid era, with white voters of both major ethnic

groups increasingly attracted to the DA, and black voters of all ethnic groups gravitating toward the

ANC. The biggest losers during this period have been parties based on Afrikaans and Zulu ethnic

mobilisation: the IFP, the FF+, and the New National Party (which went from 20.4% of the vote in

1994 to 1.5% in 2004, after which the party dissolved and merged with the ANC). Although ethnic

parties and extremist parties are not necessarily one and the same, extremist parties frequently attempt

to mobilise support along ethnic line, and the collapse of ethnic voting trends in South Africa may

provide some further clue as to the failure to extremist parties to win significant support.

Effects of the Absence of Extremist Parties?

If these hypotheses are correct, South Africa offers little in the way of policy advice for other

governments and constitutional architects wishing to minimise the role of extremist political parties in

their own societies. These explanations suggest the poor performance of extremist parties in South

Africa is a sui generis, produced by exceptional historical circumstances, and not duplicable in other

states. The South African example is, however, helpful in answering another policy-relevant question:

are extremist parties bad for politics and society at large?

Traditionally, political scientists have tended to regard extremist parties as an object of hostility, and

some democracies have reacted to extremist parties by adopting administrative measures specifically

designed to weaken them. Lipset (1960:74) argues that the presence of extremist ideological

movements creates an “unstable and weak” democracy, and Knigge (1998:249) describes extreme-

right support as indicative of “the public’s lacking commitment to democratic values and principles”.

Dodd (1976) and Taylor and Hermann (1971) find a correlation between extremist party strength and

political instability at cabinet level. Jackman & Volpert (1992:517) describe extremist parties as “a

blight on the politics of liberal democracies”, and suggest manipulating electoral systems to reduce

extremist party success. A report by the Council of Europe (2003) describes extremist party success as

“both a direct threat because it jeopardises the democratic constitutional order and freedoms, and an

indirect threat because it can distort political life”, and recommends that in order to “counteract the

harmful effects of extremism, all democracies must adopt restrictive political and administrative

measures, as well as additional measures in the field of political ethics, education or information”.

There is, however, a contrarian view, which suggests that extremist parties may not be wholly

negative, and may even have a positive role to play in some democracies. This is based on two

interrelated ideas. First is the argument that while extremist party strength may indeed reflect a weak

democracy and citizen alienation, they tend to be an expression rather than the cause of such

problems. Second is the suggestion that extremist parties may serve to “channel dissent into less

threatening and destabilizing forms of political participation” (Duch and Gibson 1992:260-261).

There is some empirical evidence in support of the first proposition. Powell (1986:372) has found no

connection between extremist parties and civic violence, and argues that extremist parties function

primarily as registers of discontent rather than causes of it. He finds that extremist parties promote

political instability at the level the cabinet and legislature, but finds no correlation between extremist

party success and riots or turmoil in the streets. Similarly, Duch and Gibson (1992:260-267) find a

correlation between extremist party support and political tolerance, noting that “political tolerance

seems to be facilitated where citizens are exposed to a wide range of political ideas - even seemingly

anti-democratic ideas - and where these ideas are accorded legitimacy”.

This loose set of ideas is far from a fully-developed theory of extremist parties, but it nevertheless

allows us to infer certain predictions. It would not lead us to uniformly predict negative consequences

arising from the absence of extremist parties, which may stem from the electorate’s preference for

moderation, satisfaction with the status quo, or an electoral system that channels political energies

into “big tent” mainstream rather than smaller parties with a higher degree of ideological purity. (All

of these factors are present to some extent, for example, in the United States of America.) However, in

a democracy where extremist party success is in some sense “natural” (that is to say, societies with

high levels of voter alienation and discontent with the socioeconomic status quo, along with other

ecological correlates of extremist party success), the weakness or absence of extremist parties may

indicate that voter alienation has increased to the point where voters are not only alienated from

mainstream parties, but from the democratic process itself. In such a situation, we might expect to see

political opposition being driven into alternative, non-party based and possibly violent avenues.

This has indeed been the case in South Africa, which has experienced a dramatic increase in violent

protest and witnessed the steady proliferation of extremist non-party organisations. Of these two

symptoms, “disorganised” extremism is more problematic, with the public increasingly turning to

public protests rather than the ballot box as a way of expressing their grievances. The Freedom of

Expression Institute (2007) has reported that were on average 15 service delivery protests per day in

South Africa during the 2004/2005 financial year, often entailing elements of violence. Last year, an

ANC councillor in the Free State was murdered by his constituents. On 18 January 2008, stranded

commuters burned six trains in Pretoria in protest over ongoing power cuts. The xenophobic riots in

May 2008 claimed the lives of at least 50 people, left 35,000 people homeless, and caused 20,000 to

flee the country (Evans 2008). In 2005 the township of Khutsong was focal point of violent protest. In

the run-up to municipal elections, authorities decided to switch the township from the administrative

control of Gauteng to the North West province consulting local residents, sparking a series of

increasingly violent protests in the area and eventually forcing the government to deploy large police

contingents in an effort to quell the violence. During the elections turnout was very low, with only

232 ballots cast in a township of 200,000 people. It is significant that dissatisfaction with existing

institutions was manifested simultaneously in the form of disengagement from formal democracy, and

violent protest.

Extremist organisations pose less of a threat than “disorganised” extremism, but the successful

proliferation of extremist non-party organisations is nevertheless significant, and contrasts sharply

with the failure of extremist political parties. Extremist non-party groups exist on both the left and the

right, with the right-wing groups typically being more secretive, more radical and more prone to

violence, but also smaller in terms of membership. The most well-known extremist right-wing

organisation is the Boeremag, a terrorist group which planned to carry out a coup d’etat against the

government and planted eight bombs in Soweto in 2002. The Boeremag was estimated by the South

African police to have roughly 100 members its peak (Schönteich 2003), but a police crackdown

following the bombing campaign effectively destroyed the group’s operational capacity. Extremist

right-wing groups may still pose a limited security threat, but they do not pose a serious challenge to

constitutional governance in South Africa. Their following is too small, and they are intrinsically

wedded to a white nationalist ideology which ensures that their support will always be limited to a

tiny percentage of the population. Following the collapse of paramilitary organisations such as the

Boeremag, right-wing extremists withdrawn from politics altogether, emigrated, or retreated to

anonymous internet-based groups where they can voice their dissatisfaction with the South African

state.

By contrast, extreme left-wing groups such have eschewed terrorism and other violent means. Unlike

right-wing grounds, left-wing social movements have genuine mass appeal, and have expanded

significantly during the post-apartheid era. Their impact was first brought to national attention during

the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, when 5,000 delegates from various left-wing

groups participated in a week-long meeting which culminated in a march of 25,000 (Greenburg

2004:13). The most well-known left-wing groups are the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) and the

Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), which have attracted large membership while calling for the

complete restructuring of South Africa’s liberal political and economic system. Despite their official

rejection of violent tactics, the ideology of these groups meets the definition of extremism. The LPM

has supported Robert Mugabe’s land expropriation programme and advocated the mass occupation of

private land in South Africa, in defiance of South African law and the constitution (Greenburg

2004:30-31). One article on the APF’s website bemoans the “automatic reflex” of mainstream trade

unions to treat the “democratic state and by extension its institutions are legitimate and acceptable”,

rather than institutions which are “characterised as bourgeois” (APF 2005). Another article attacks the

legitimacy of the South African state, asserting that “state power in the hands of a boss’s party can not

serve the interests and can not serve the needs of the working class” (APF 2006). With all extremist

organisations, the danger exists that if radical elements are not incorporated into the political process,

they might eventually pose a larger danger on the streets.

Conclusion

Most of the conditions associated with extremist-party success are present in South Africa, including a

proportional electoral system, a high percentage of uneducated voters, unrestrained immigration,

unemployment and voter alienation, yet extremist parties have not enjoyed success in the South

African electoral system. It is difficult to say precisely why South Africa is anomalous in this respect,

but the causal factors are probably related to South Africa’s unique historical and cultural

circumstances rather than policies put in place by the South African government.

The South African example also suggests that the absence of extremist parties is not necessarily a sign

of a healthy democracy. It is probably impossible to prove a direct causal relationship between the

absence of notable extremist political parties and the presence of “disorganised” political extremism

and extremist non-party organisations. It is plausible that the weakness of extremist parties in the

electoral system has lead would-be extremist voters to opt out of the system altogether, in favour of

extremist non-party alternatives. However, if there is in fact a causal relationship between these two

variables, it may run in the opposite direction: the proliferation of non-party avenues for political

protest may have rendered extremist parties redundant. Alternatively, there may be other factors that

account for both variables. For example, cultural observers have noted that South Africa’s political

history created a “protest culture” which persists in the post-apartheid era (Twala & Koetaan

2006:179), and which may encourage voters who are dissatisfied with the status quo to boycott the

democratic process rather than expressing their grievances through the ballot box. The “protest

culture” hypothesis has the potential to explain both the weakness of extremist parties and the high

incidence of popular protests, as well as addressing the broader question of why dissatisfaction with

South Africa’s socioeconomic status quo has not been reflected in voting behaviour. Nevertheless, the

dramatic contrast between failed extremist parties and growing non-party extremism is an important

phenomenon. At the very least, the South African case reinforces the argument that extremist parties

are a symptom rather than a cause of broader social and political problems, and suggests that

excessive preoccupation with extremist party success is at best cosmetic, and at worst a distraction

from the underlying causes of alienation.

These insights also suggest that South African extremist parties would be a productive area for further

research. In order to facilitate further research on extremism and political parties in South Africa, it

would be helpful to create a left-right scale of South African political parties, similar to the one

Castles & Mair (1984) have created for European parties. This would give researchers of measuring

the relative extremism of political parties, individuals, and groups, and would allow the use of

qualitative research techniques in the study of party extremism. In the field of comparative politics,

further research could help to identify other states that are also anomalous: states in which extremist

parties are either unexpectedly weak or unexpectedly strong. If similar cases do exist, researchers can

begin to determine whether they are genuine anomalies created by unique circumstances, or whether

there are generalities between these countries, possibly pointing to causes and inhibitors of extremist

party strength that have been missed by existing research.

Most importantly, it would be worthwhile to conduct empirical research of South African voters, to

determine definitely why they have decisively rejected extremist parties. Such research should aim to

determine whether hostility to extremist parties is “hard” or “soft”, whether voters would consider

supporting extremist parties if they were packaged differently, whether there is any correlation

between extremist party support and demographic divisions (including age, race, gender and

language), and the relationship between voters’ support for extremist parties and their views on issues

such as immigration, economics and social policy. The ultimate aim of this research should be to

develop a theory of extremist parties that not only accounts for the causes of extremist party success,

but also attempts to explain the nature the of the relationship between extremist political parties and

extremism outside of the party system.

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