The introduction of the Capitalist Party of South Africa, the ZACP, has unveiled a well-used but false trope I will call the ‘dilution of the vote argument’. Broadly speaking, the argument claims that a vote for a small party fractures the opposition to the DA and dilutes the efficacy of any opposition to a governing party. This is a misguided understanding of the South African political system.
South Africa has a proportional representation electoral system. In an election, political parties who receive votes win the number of seats in Parliament that are directly proportional to the number of votes they received in an election. For example, a party that earned 10% of the vote will receive 10% of the seats in Parliament. Countries like Germany, Hungary and Greece have a similar electoral system.
Unlike in those countries, however, in South Africa there is no minimum threshold for representation in parliament. This means that every 0,25% of the vote a party receives secures it one additional MP in the National Assembly.
Our system stands in contrast to the first past the post system found in the United Kingdom, where votes for a losing candidate are considered "wasted”. In the 2015 general elections UKIP garnered 3,9 million votes, or 12,6% of the total. This secured them one (0,2%) out of the 650 seats in the House of Commons.
There is another more insidious form of the claim where the Democratic Alliance is the vanguard opposition in South African politics and voting for a smaller party strengthens the ANC. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The DA has been the official opposition for twenty years and they have recently struggled to clearly delineate a principled path for themselves or for the citizens of South Africa.