The fifth democratic national elections in South Africa were held in 2014.

The Democratic Alliance (DA), the official national opposition and ruling party in the Western Cape, and the ANC made increasingly opportunistic use of real issues such as road tolling in Gauteng, toilets in the Western Cape and corruption everywhere. As always, the party politicians took their claim to represent the interests of the poor to the most remote and underprivileged areas of South Africa. They raised hope by making promises that will never be fulfilled. At the same time, competition for the spoils of office is likely to be accompanied by an increase in violence.

For CLP, it is clear that emancipatory politics cannot be sustained together with any form of representative politics. This obviously includes parliamentary democracy but it emphatically also includes modes of “speaking for” that are so ubiquitous in civil society organisations, leftist university spaces and prophetic churches.