CHRIS ROPER: Election posters: the good, the bad and the invisible
Election posters aren’t enough to tell you why you should vote for a particular party. But you can learn something from them, from the language they use to the cult of personality they reveal — and from their absence, too
As we get closer to election day, there’s the usual escalation into circus-like behaviour by politicians and their parties. Ostensibly tamed predators are wheeled out to do tricks for the crowd, as in the case of the MK Party, and custard pies are flung around in the hope that one of them sticks. There are the inevitable pratfalls, such as DA leader John Steenhuisen complaining that voters seem to believe, mistakenly, that democracy means they can just sommer vote for anyone.
That wasn’t what he said, of course, but it’s the gleeful takeaway that the other parties latched onto. Steenhuisen’s main point, it seems, was that “instead of fighting to fix the eight ANC provinces that have been smashed to pieces, the political mercenaries in parties like the Patriotic Alliance [PA], Rise Mzansi, GOOD and the National Coloured Congress are obsessed with trying to break the one DA province that works”. ..
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