The Patriotic Alliance (PA) is a South African political party, formed in November 2013 by, among others, businessman Gayton McKenzie, and by socialite Kenny Kunene, a former English teacher turned businessman.
The party at its announcement stated that it intended to contest the 2014 national and provincial elections in South Africa, with a particular focus on the Western Cape province, although it would also attempt to have a particular presence in the Free State, Gauteng, Northern Cape and North West. On March 12, 2013 the party paid deposit fees to the Independent Electoral Commission to contest nationally and in four provinces on May 7, 2014. On its official website and elsewhere, the party has described itself as a credible alternative to both the Democratic Alliance (DA), which is the ruling party in the Western Cape, and the African National Congress, which governs the rest of the country. These parties have each, in turn, dismissed the PA as a credible threat and have said that in their view the party would disappear from the political landscape and not make a "significant contribution to the political discourse", which had proven to be the case with "smaller parties" in South Africa's past.
The party fared relatively poorly in its first national and provincial elections in 2014, garnering 0,07% of the national vote, with its best showing 0,4% in the Western Cape. The party had hoped to force a coalition in the Western Cape, but the DA's share of the vote in fact grew after the election.
The PA gained its first elected representatives in the 2016 municipal elections. Although the party only received 0,06% of the national vote, it picked up seats in the metropolitan municipalities of Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay, Johannesburg and Ekurhuleni, aided in part by the low threshold for representation in these councils. It also picked up a seat in Tokologo Local Municipality with a strong 10% of the vote.
The party made a breakthrough in the 2021 municipal elections, with big gains in the Western Cape and some wards in Gauteng. It currently has 85 Council seats.
Background
The party's current president, McKenzie, has explained that the inspiration for the formation of the party came from his mediation, with Kunene and others, in extraordinary levels of gang violence during 2013 in the Western Cape, particularly in Manenberg.
The imminent release of Rashied Staggie, a former head of the Hard Livings gang, was in part blamed for the increase in tension and violence among gangs on the Cape Flats. This gang war had already claimed so many lives that Western Cape Premier Helen Zille had at one point asked for the army to be sent into Manenberg, though this request was turned down by national government. McKenzie has said he met with Staggie in prison ahead of the latter's release on day parole and he claims he obtained an assurance from Staggie that he would actively work to promote peace. Meetings were then arranged between the heads of all gangs and a fragile peace was established.
McKenzie has since stated that the experience left him with a belief that successive governments in the Western Cape had not done enough to eradicate the root causes of gangsterism and crime and that the only way to ensure that this could be changed would be if a new political entity was established to address this issue as well as many of the other challenges facing poor communities across South Africa.
Party support
The bulk of the party's support is to be found among the coloured communities of the Gauteng Province, although the party has stated that it is not a coloureds-only party and will canvass for support among all voters. In interviews, representatives have stated that the party has its roots in the coloured community and will therefore be putting political issues that affect the coloured community on the agenda. The party states that, in its opinion, no other party is catering directly for the needs of so-called "coloured voters".
At the beginning of March 2014, a founding member of the DA, Freddie Kearns, announced that he had left the DA and his job as a councillor and was joining the PA in order to grow the party in the Western Cape; he added that he was dissatisfied with the way the DA had, according to him, abandoned its coloured constituents. "The DA is just using the coloured vote, afterwards they discard our people. When the masses come in their thousands to complain to the DA, they are ignored," he said.