A Parliament without the struggle heroes after 2019 Elections?
The 6th democratic Parliament could resume also without key struggle heroes, including those from the PAC, AZAPO, and COPE.
Political analyst Theo Venter says on the back of the lower voter turnout in the 2019 National and Provincial Elections, securing a seat in Parliament will require less votes than anticipated.
Voter turnout is expected to end up in the low 70%’s at best and Venter says parties would most
likely require only about 42,000 votes to secure a seat in the National Assembly.
However, a number of parties are battling to secure even that amount of votes and Venter predicts that this could be the end of Mosiuoa Lekota's Congress of the People (COPE).
The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) and the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo) have also been struggling to get enough votes to secure a seat.
“I must remind you that in the previous Parliament we had four political parties that didn't reach the sub-minimum amount needed to enter parliament," said Venter.
Addressing the media at the national results operations centre in Pretoria on Friday, Lekota
said he wasn’t expecting such poor showing for his party, but he still believes the party has a future.
“You don’t set up a party and expect it will just drop down and finish,” said a sombre-looking
Lekota.
African Content Movement (ACM) leader, Hlaudi Motsoeneng had not secured the votes needed to
elevate him to Parliament, much less the Union Buildings.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum though, the newly established GOOD movement
of Patricia de Lille and Mzwanele Manyi’s African Transformation Movement (ATM) had both secured enough votes to be relatively certain of a seat in Parliament.
The Freedom Front Plus (FF+Plus) has been the party to watch in these elections and has doubled
the amount of votes than they got in the 2014 general elections. The party is expected to secure 12 seats in the National Assembly after the elections.
"For most political parties the next step is to use parliament as a stepping stone for the local government elections in 2021," Venter said.