Johannesburg – The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is prepared to form coalitions with the ANC on the condition that the two parties share the control of municipalities instead of working together in councils.
During an interview with Sunday World on Friday, EFF deputy president Floyd Shivambu made it clear that the party was not prepared to get into bed with the DA after the forthcoming local elections.
Shivambu said coalition politics where parties shared power in a single municipality had failed in that parties had clashing policy priorities, and the sharing of power had allowed for “unholy” alliances, where underhanded deals were cut that had little to do with service delivery.
“We will discuss it (coalition with the ANC) on the basis of saying, we can’t work within a municipality together,” Shivambu said. “With the posture that the DA is defining itself to be now, I don’t think it will be possible to meet with them about anything. The DA just decided to be an exclusively white party. The principles (between the two parties) are too far apart to even meet,” he added.
The party is celebrating its 8th anniversary tomorrow and the red berets’ second-in-command said he was confident that they would score 30% of the national percentage and become the second-biggest party after the ANC.
“It will be a serious underachievement if we get below 30% of the vote. This is not unscientific, it is not a wish,” he said.
“If you read the by-elections, we always average 20% and above. Now with a properly structured campaign, the ANC in crisis and the DA in crisis, our numbers are going to settle around 30% nationally. Definitely, we will be the second-biggest party.”
The souring of relations between the DA and EFF, along with the ANC’s manoeuvring in Tshwane and Johannesburg, has seen the DA-EFF coalitions being dislodged in the metros. The two parties have also performed dismally in recent by-elections, during which the ANC clawed back its support after it was thrown out of power in metros during the 2016 local elections.
The EFF did not win a single ward in the recent polls, but Shivambu insisted that the party was on an upward trajectory. He conceded that the organization found it tough to wrestle power from the ANC at grassroot level.
“One thing we can admit as the EFF is that when we started, in the majority of communities we attracted mostly unemployed people, who did not have any history of activism. They are joining politics for the first time in the EFF. That is the core of the EFF membership.”
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