South African activist Zackie Achmat, centre, joins thousands of people to take part in the annual Cape Town Pride Parade in Cape Town, South Africa, on March 2. Mr. Achmat is standing as an independent candidate in the country's upcoming general elections.RODGER BOSCH/Getty Images
Zackie Achmat, one of South Africa’s most renowned activists, once helped to save millions of lives by leading the fight for access to HIV medicine. Now he’s trying to save democracy itself.
Thirty years after the country’s first democratic election, a growing number of South Africans have become deeply alienated from traditional politics and parties. In the last national election in 2019, for the first time ever, more than half of potential voters did not even bother to cast ballots.
As a new election approaches on May 29, with the electorate increasingly fragmented and disillusioned, Mr. Achmat is trying something radically new: he is running as an independent candidate. If he wins, he will seek to overhaul the political system in a country where poverty and inequality still run deep.
Mr. Achmat spent his youth as an underground member of the African National Congress, often jailed for his fight against apartheid. In 1976, at the age of 14, when students were boycotting schools in protest against apartheid, he burned down his own school – and was arrested by the police, the first of seven arrests he endured.
Later, in 1998, he co-founded the Treatment Action Campaign, which led a historic court case that forced the government to provide life-saving HIV medicine. He abandoned the ANC in the early 2000s during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when the government was still reluctant to supply medicine to the millions who could not afford it.
Since 1994, when apartheid ended, the ANC has won every election – but its vote totals have steadily eroded as voters punish it for its widespread corruption and economic mismanagement.
As the ANC declines, no other political party has managed to capture the enthusiasm of the voters. Many are limited to a narrow ethnic or ideological base.
About 70 per cent of South Africans are dissatisfied with the way democracy works in their country, opinion polls show. Almost 80 per cent say they cannot trust their leaders, compared to just 20 per cent two decades ago. Many voters have simply dropped out of elections.
Meanwhile, the party system has splintered, reflecting a divided country. In the election this month, an astonishing 70 parties will be on the ballots – including 31 new parties.
Perhaps more significantly, 11 independent candidates are running. A court ruling in December removed some of the long-standing obstacles to their candidacies, making it easier for them to qualify for the ballot.
Polls suggest that the ANC could fail to win a majority of votes this time, for the first time since it took power. This would curb its powers, forcing it to negotiate with other parties to seek coalition partners in order to maintain its parliamentary majority.
Mr. Achmat wants to go beyond the politics of coalitions. He argues that the entire party system is breeding discontent. Under the South African electoral system, each party has a list of candidates that it can appoint to Parliament, depending on its share of the vote. But voters have no control over these lists. Appointees to key posts – such as provincial premier – are not disclosed until after the election. MPs have no links to specific constituencies, and every MP’s job is dependent on the whims of the party’s bosses.
If he can win a parliamentary seat, Mr. Achmat aims to challenge all this. He wants to be accountable to the people, not a party. He wants the links between MP and voter to be as direct as possible. And he believes that an MP has vast amounts of potential power – rarely exercised – in parliamentary committees and other structures.
“The deep disaffection with the ANC in its traditional communities has opened up the contestation space,” he told The Globe and Mail in an interview.
“The disaffection with traditional parties is phenomenal. We need to bring people back into politics, and that’s exactly why I’m standing. I’m bringing in people who’ve given up on voting, and people who won’t vote for a political party.”
South Africans will vote in a national election on May 29 with an unprecedented sense of uncertainty about the outcome, as polls suggest the African National Congress will lose its majority after 30 years in power.
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More than half of South Africa’s population were born after the first democratic election, he noted. For younger voters, apartheid is in the distant past, and the ANC’s fight for liberation is old history. Their daily reality is the spread of state corruption and economic stagnation, with South Africa’s economy still ranked by most measures as the most unequal in the world.
Hobbled by energy shortages and the breakdown of state infrastructure, the South African economy has grown slower than the country’s population for more than a decade, causing a decline in per-capita income and a rise in unemployment.
“The only reality that younger people see is the downward trajectory of the state, and the inability of the other political parties to do anything about it,” Mr. Achmat said.
“The deep inequality in the country is driving the collapse of the state and the disaffection of the people, and it drives corruption. You have a class of people who wish to become wealthy very quickly, and the state has become the thing to milk. You have a state that has become kleptocratic across most of the country.”
In his battle to get into parliament, Mr. Achmat might have the best chance of any independent candidate in this election. He is running in his home region, Western Cape province, where he is revered as an activist hero. More than 3,000 volunteers have mobilized to help his campaign.
But while the rules for independent candidates have loosened, the system is still tilted against them. On the election ballot, Mr. Achmat is obliged to seek votes across the entire Western Cape province, competing against 32 political parties, rather than running in a specific constituency. He estimates that he’ll need to gain as many as 85,000 votes to enter parliament, while a candidate for a political party might only need half as much support.
Because of this imbalance, his campaign needs to raise much more money than a candidate for a political party. So far he has raised about 10 million rand (about $740,000), and he estimates that he still needs another 2 million rand.
On the campaign trail, he witnesses the dangers of the growing political alienation among ordinary voters. Many parties are now seeking votes with populist schemes: deporting foreigners, abolishing the constitution, or restoring the death penalty.
“The lower the voter turnout, the greater the danger that the country will split and divide itself and turn in on itself, and the greater the risk of authoritarian solutions,” he said.
“We have one task ahead of us, and that is to fix the state. I’m willing to work with any political party that agrees to fix the state.”