EDITORIAL: Let the people elect the leader
The big problem is that as soon as you hold the first election, the incentives for all of the parties change
Should SA have a constitutional amendment to introduce a directly elected president? It’s one of those questions that sits somewhere between fantastical and intriguing. The desirability of the idea needs to be separated from the question of whether it is actually conceivable in the country’s current political environment. In some ways, the question was asked and answered way back in the early 1990s and we are more or less forced to live with it as it stands. The big problem is that as soon as you hold the first election, the incentives for all of the parties change. It’s probable, but by no means definite, that the opposition parties would favour the creation of an independently elected president now because it may provide a way for opposition parties to stand on the same platform as the representative of the majority party. In the eyes of voters, they would be seen for a brief moment perhaps, as equivalents of a sort. What great propaganda. For precisely this reason, larger parties...
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