The case for the VF Plus

In June 2022, Britain’s Reform UK party looked politically irrelevant.

Fresh from a by-election in which it secured just 1.1% of the vote, it was struggling even to register in national polling, and when it did, it rarely broke beyond the 5% barrier. The media treated it, at best, as an afterthought, and at worst, a joke.

Yet in less than 4 short years, the party has completely transformed.

Reform UK now regularly polls in the high twenties and low thirties – by far the leading party in British politics at the moment. They have growing representation in Parliament. And most significantly, they have displaced the most successful party in the history of the world, the Conservative Party as the natural home of right-wing voters. A marginal movement is now at the centre of one of the greatest realignments in British political history.

How did this happen?

Political earthquakes don’t happen overnight. Like tectonic plates, they are the result of pressures that build silently beneath the surface until the eventual rupture becomes unavoidable. The shock Brexit referendum result of 2016 was one such moment of rupture, but the forces that drove it have been brewing for years.

Central to all of this is one word: betrayal.

The Conservative Party was elected in a landslide in 2019, on a promise of radical change – above all to bring mass migration under control and deliver on the promises of Brexit. Yet, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in what has become termed as the “Boriswave”, mass migration reached record highs in the millions of people each year. The tax burden reached the highest levels since the Second World War. Wokeness, as evidenced with the state’s obedience towards the Black Lives Matter movement and gender ideology, was allowed to proliferate. Moreover, in many ways they refused to govern, allowing the ideologically captured civil service to continue as if it was business as usual.

In short, they were elected to govern right, but ended up governing far to the left of the average British voter.

A similar story has begun to emerge in South Africa.

In the run-up to the 2024 election, the DA positioned itself as the last bulwark against ANC rule. Voters were warned, repeatedly and in alarmist terms, that a vote for smaller parties would result in the

re-election of the ANC. Cooperation with the ANC was ruled out – “That hope is now well and truly dashed” declared Helen Zille in 2022.

Yet that position barely survived 24 hours after the results were declared.

While many voters may have been prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt, viewing the move as a tactical measure to keep out the “Doomsday Coalition” and assuming the party would act as a constraint on ANC excesses, that expectation has not been met.

Instead, the ANC has continued to advance major pieces of legislation – from NHI to BELA and EWC – with little meaningful resistance from its coalition partner. On key votes and budgetary processes, the DA has found itself marginalised, its objections often ignored.

At the same time, the party has appeared increasingly willing to turn its attention inward and outward in unproductive ways – sidelining internal dissent, such as their former foreign relations spokesperson Emma Powell, while alienating civil society organisations with which it had previously maintained constructive relationships.

In the Western Cape, rising municipal rates and taxes, ongoing infrastructure pressures from land invasions and illegal settlement, and an unwillingness to fully utilise provincial powers have created the impression of a government that is content with the status quo of managed decline. Despite long-standing commitments to greater devolution, there has been little concrete progress in advancing these principles, even where the party has had the institutional capacity to do so. If you dare criticise the DA for these governance mis-steps, then their presumptive leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis, will simply dismiss you as a racist and a “Temu Terreblanche”.

The DA’s actions have generated a vacuum on the right of South African politics, particularly among minority communities such as the Afrikaners, whom the VF Plus under the leadership of Dr. Corné Mulder appears to be successfully winning over.

While both parties sit within the GNU, they have taken starkly different approaches to their roles within it. The DA has chosen to define itself from within government – a choice perhaps best illustrated by the now-infamous moment in which its outgoing leader, John Steenhuisen, was presented in the Oval Office as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s “white minister” – paraded like foot and mouth disease infected livestock at auction.

By contrast, the VF Plus has taken a different path. While formally within the GNU, it has been careful to define itself politically outside of it. On issues such as foreign policy, it has made clear that it does not simply echo the government line, as evidenced by Mulder’s repeated independent engagements with Washington.

Furthermore, the party’s willingness to embrace former DA figures such as Renaldo Gouws – who represent a significant conservative strand within that party – suggests a clear strategy to consolidate the conservative-minded vote around the VF Plus. The DA’s age-old argument that a vote for a smaller party

“splits their mandate” ceases to be effective when voters increasingly recognise that that mandate never served their interests in the first place.

By merging with the Referendum Party and striking a cooperation agreement with the Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG), the party has made it abundantly clear that it is recommitting itself to self-determination. This has already been evident in recent years through initiatives such as the Western Cape Peoples Bill and sustained campaigning for the right of the people of the Cape to hold referendums on greater autonomy and independence.

It can also be seen elsewhere in the country in more localised forms, such as their championing of community upliftment precincts in places like Pretoria. These have enabled community members to become active participants in maintaining and improving their areas – from managing parks and neighbourhood watches to installing CCTV and maintaining basic infrastructure.

With a stronger degree of cooperation between the CIAG – now one of the premier think tanks in South Africa researching the legal and strategic pathways to self-determination – and the leading political party advancing that cause, there is a growing capacity to bring these issues to the forefront of national debate. In particular, this creates a more credible pathway towards operationalising section 235 of the Constitution through both policy development and parliamentary engagement.

The consequences of this political realignment will be felt far beyond the next by-election, local election, or national election. While a stronger voice in Parliament has its benefits, on its own it risks amounting to little more than a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. The deeper implication is the potential for a realignment of South Africa’s constitutional order – towards one in which regions and communities have a far greater ability to determine their own futures, and can move from merely surviving to genuinely prospering, free from the constraints imposed by an over-centralised state.

In a recent debate, the VF Plus’ Northern Cape Leader, Wynand Boshoff, correctly identified South Africa not as a nation, as it is often described, but as something closer to an empire – a collection of distinct communities and identities. In biblical terms, he contrasted the imposition of uniformity under Babylon with the Persian model, which allowed different peoples to retain their own cultures.

Today, South Africa more closely resembles Babylon; it should instead strive to become Persia. There are many paths to self-determination, but the political and legislative arena remains central to its realisation – and in that space, the VF Plus is best placed to carry the fight.