THE LIBERTARIANS WOULD LOVE TO GARNER NINE PERCENT.

Our President dressed down the visiting president of South Africa for what might have been a call for ethnic cleansing in South Africa and Brett Wilkins, of (who else?) Common Dreams didn't like it.

The U.S. president had the lights dimmed so he could play video footage he claimed was related to genocidal violence committed by Black South Africans against their white compatriots.

One of the videos showed fringe politician Julius Mulema—who was kicked out of Ramaphosa's African National Congress party— leading a crowd in the singing of the apartheid-era song "Kill the Boer."

Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters party won a paltry 9% of the vote in last year's national elections. When Ramaphosa—who condemned the song—explained this to Trump, the U.S. president asked why the politician hasn't been arrested. While South Africa's highest court ruled in 2011 that the song is hate speech, Ramaphosa explained that, like Americans, South Africans enjoy constitutionally protected free speech rights.

Unlike United States citizens, though, South Africans enjoy the dubious benefits of a parliamentary government, in which a party garnering nine percent can be much more than an irritated rump.  For the past year, the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela's old party) has been in coalition with nine other parties.

Voter participation, or the lack thereof, in South African elections looks like a fertile field for applied and theoretical research.

Neither the ANC nor the opposition succeed in engaging large proportions of voters in election campaigns, and opposition parties generally fail to offer effective alternatives on the issues people care about most. Unsurprisingly, dissatisfied voters tend to exit the electorate rather than switch their vote, and voter turnout has declined by more than thirty percentage points over this period. Thus, South Africa’s parties have, collectively, weakened the country’s democratic experiment by failing to offer the country’s citizens a competitive electoral arena with effective choice.

There's a fair amount of material in that article for those interested in designing institutions.  That Economic Freedom Fighters lot are relatively new.

Indeed, of all the parties with 10 or more seats in the current 400-seat legislature, only the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was formed since the end of apartheid in 1994. While however, certainly a new organization, the EFF is still strongly influenced by the apartheid era—it was formed largely by defectors from the ruling ANC—and it is also limited in its commitment to liberal democracy. Explicitly placing itself to the left of the ANC, with its main issue position focused on the rapid transfer of land to black people, it presents a militant image, with an informal costume of red berets and red shirts, and rhetoric that easily qualifies as ‘populist’ (Fölscher et al. 2021.

For all the theoretical advantages of proportional representation and parliaments forming a government, there are still mischiefs of faction.

With the exception of the Congress of the People (COPE) (2009), and the EFF (2014 and 2019), none of the parties formed in the post-apartheid period have ever won more than 5% of the popular vote, and they give every indication that they are satisfied with their limited vote shares so long as it guarantees party leaders a parliamentary seat and salary.

The fourth important characteristic of the system is a steadily declining rate of voter participation. Conservatively estimated at 86% in 1994, images of long snake-like lines of voters patiently waiting to cast their first ballots flashed around the world. But turnout has declined consistently in every election since then, falling under 50% of the voting-age population for the first time in 2019. This is not a problem unique to South Africa, of course, but it does have significant implications for the robustness of the young democracy.

Yes, I'm grabbing excerpts relevant to Mr Wilkins's shot at that nine percent. The Freedom Fighters figure in a larger taxonomy of four features, "none of which bode well for the sustainability of high levels of representative democracy."  From that perspective, Our President calling attention to a relatively strong party outside the governing coalition singing a Horst Wessel Lied with the colors reversed might make some sort of political sense.

Or perhaps, Mr Wilkins argues, it's Republicans hoping to expand their voting base by importing deplorables who will go on welfare.

Writing for The Intercept, South African author Sisonke Msimang noted Wednesday that the Afrikaners granted refuge by Trump "are not impoverished or persecuted, and therefore do not warrant the label refugee."

"It is worth pointing out that the new arrivals represent the bottom rung of the Afrikaner socioeconomic ladder: those who have not been able to transition smoothly into post-apartheid South Africa without the protections that white skin privilege would have afforded them a generation ago," she continued.

"In the absence of formal white supremacy at home, they have opted to take up an offer to be the first beneficiaries of America's new international affirmative action scheme for white people," Msimang said. "That they should experience their loss of privilege as so catastrophic that they are prepared to label it genocide is absurd, sad, and, to some amongst the political class certainly, infuriating."

The resettled Afrikaners could also be in for a rude awakening. As South African attorney and columnist Judith February wrote this week for the Daily Maverick, "This little group will also come to learn that the U.S. is no land of milk and honey."

"The white utopia that they believe will greet them is in fact a country at odds with itself as it deals with its own racial tensions and inequality," February added. "And one in which they will have neither special protection nor special voice. The lesson will be a hard one."

To the student of constitutional design, South Africa is anomalous.  " South Africa has developed a party system that provides one of the largest known exceptions to ‘Duverger’s Law’, with a closed party list formula of proportional representation (PR) producing one-party dominance and a very low number of effective political parties that could exercise any real sort of checks and balances on the ruling ANC."  As is often the case with governance, it is the compromise in service of an immediate goal that might bring the greatest ultimate challenges.

As a result of three decades of apartheid settlement policies, however, voters overwhelmingly lived in a complex pattern of homogenous racial and ethnic enclaves, thus complicating the demarcation of reasonably small multi-member districts that did not simply replicate apartheid divisions. Given the urgency of reaching an inclusive agreement and bringing closure to the protracted and violent transition, moreover, negotiators opted for the simplest form of PR possible, with half of the 400-seat National Assembly selected from national party lists and the other half from nine geographically large party lists corresponding to the country’s new system of provinces. Because these lists are closed, South Africans vote for a political party, not a candidate, and that single vote is then used to calculate seats on both the national and provincial lists.

Very messy.  The ruling party, though, went predictably wrong.

Just how legit are these claims of genocide? They'd be less credible if Ramaphosa and the ANC weren't passing confiscatory laws to satisfy the extremists that Nelson Mandela succeeded in tamping down for several years. The NYT hints at one problem in determining intentionality: post-Mandela South Africa has descended into a violent and crime-ridden country, thanks to the Marxist-leaning ANC's policies and inept leadership that plagued most of the rest of post-colonial Africa. Ramaphosa is only a million-dollar bill away from Zimbabwe, and expropriation in the cause of justice is one big reason Zimbabwe went from breadbasket to basket case. This may well be a case of allowing the inmates to run the asylum rather than an intentional policy against the "Boers," but even so, it doesn't let Ramaphosa and the ANC off the hook for it.

And the Militant Normals on Insta Pundit are having no end of fun with the pearl-clutching.