How the Freedom Front Plus ate (some of) the DA’s lunch
Former DA supporters who voted for the Freedom Front Plus in this year’s election felt alienated by the party, vulnerable in a country where race dominates national discourse and concerned about a future where they believe their culture and identity is being threatened. But beyond that, it was the DA’s handling of the matter around the Afrikaans teacher in the town of Schweizer-Reneke and a speech by Mmusi Maimane about “white privilege and black poverty” that pushed DA voters into the arms of the FF Plus, say Philip van Staden, a member of the party’s national executive.
Van Staden and Wouter Wessels, the FF Plus’s campaign manager, were omnipresent at the IEC’s Results Operations Centre (ROC) this week, cheering whenever the party eclipsed another milestone. Since the party peaked at 424 555 votes for a 2,17% share of the electorate in 1994, it has struggled to make significant impact, dwelling at around 0,80% and 0,90% of the vote since. But is has suddenly surged back this year, capturing 249 147 more votes (at the time of writing) than the 165 715 it secured in 2014. Most, of these votes, if not all, came at the expense of the DA, who have shed more than 470 000 votes and almost two percentage points since 2014.
The FF Plus will now have 10 MPs (up from four) in the National Assembly, as well as two representatives in the National Council of Provinces and has representatives in eight of the nine provinces. Its public representatives in the national and provincial legislatures have now gone up from seven to 23. News24’s election analyst Dawie Scholtz found that DA support in suburban areas (which include a majority of white voters) decreased from 81,9% to 70,5% of the vote.
The FF Plus by contrast increased their suburban support base from 2,6% to 8,4%. “We couldn’t be happier,” says Wessels, who is an MP and served as spokesperson to former FF Plus leader Pieter Mulder. “We worked hard to become a home for people who are concerned about minority rights and issues like language. We now have to keep them.”
Van Staden says the party was reconfigured after the 2014 election and the ascension of Pieter Groenewald (who took over as leader from Mulder). “When we walked out of here (the ROC) we started planning for 2019. And we worked hard to identify issues that our supporters were concerned by.” The FF Plus was found by Constand Viljoen, a former commander of the old SA Defence Force, ahead of the 1994 election. Its focus was on preserving the rights of Afrikaners and the establishment of an Afrikaner volkstaat. The “plus” refers to the Conservative Party which later joined the FF, as it was known.