On November 27, 2024, Namibians will head to the polls to elect a new president and parliament. This will be the seventh general election since the country gained its independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990.
Despite being considered a consolidated democracy by V-Dem, Freedom House, and others, only one party has ever governed the country democratically at the parliamentary and presidential levels: that party is the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO, centre-left). Since Namibia won its independence, SWAPO has consistently commanded a two-thirds majority in the parliament except for the 2019 election. The country’s presidential elections have never gone to a runoff, with all of SWAPO’s presidential candidates being elected in the first round of voting.
History
Namibia’s modern history traces back to the establishment of German Southwest Africa, a colony of its namesake founded in 1884. After the end of World War I, the region became part of the Union of South Africa, which was still under the British Empire at the time. South Africa was later granted a League of Nations mandate to administer the colony and, eventually, grant it independence.
However, the apartheid government expressed little interest in relinquishing the trust territory. Decades before independence, in 1960, SWAPO was formed to create an independent state. It succeeded the short-lived Ovamboland People’s Organization (OPO) that was founded a year earlier. Protests, strikes, and even political violence were all tactics that SWAPO and its allies used against the South African apartheid government. After apartheid ended and Namibians gained independence, SWAPO’s anti-colonial credibility would allow it to retain power continuously since 1990.
The Frontrunner
Single-party parliamentary majorities aren’t rare by themselves. They tend to be rare in countries that use proportional representation, where the share of votes cast directly matches the seats won by the party. In most countries, this usually means no single party gets over 50% of the vote and consequently, no party can govern alone. However, there are exceptions. The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA, centre-left), the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO, centre-left), and, until recently, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC, centre-left) are examples of left-leaning, national liberation movements in the region that managed to win single-party majorities under proportional representation consistently. It should be noted though that V-Dem categorizes Angola and Mozambique as “electoral autocracies.”
Keeping in line with other similar movements, SWAPO is traditionally considered centre-left. In 2017, the party adopted the overarching goal of adopting socialism with a “Namibian character,” and pursuing social democratic policies, notably by retaining support for a market economy.
In 2019, SWAPO’s share of the parliamentary vote fell to under 67% for the first time since independence, losing its parliamentary supermajority. However, with the inclusion of the eight members of parliament appointed by the recently deceased President Hage Geingob, it retained a working, de-facto supermajority in the body.
Polling data for Namibia is relatively scarce. The most recent poll from Afrobarometer published in August 2024 reveals that roughly 65% of voters who expressed a preference for one of Namibia’s main political parties chose SWAPO. The poll’s findings match the vote share that the party won in 2019. This means that if the parliament members appointed in 2019 are excluded, SWAPO could repeat its 2019 performance and fail to get a supermajority in parliament for the second straight time. It should be noted that Afrobarometer polls frequently see large numbers of respondents who did not select a party preference, about 50% opted out of this survey.
SWAPO draws significant support from ethnic Ovambo voters in the north. Unsurprisingly, most of the country’s population lives in the northern region near the border with Angola. Much of this owes to SWAPO’s historical roots with the OPO.
The Race for Second Place
Formerly called the Democratic Turnhalle alliance, the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM, centre-right) has consistently come in either second or third place in the parliamentary elections in every election since Namibia became a democracy. In 2019, the party scored its best results since 1994 — the country’s first post-independence election — at roughly 16.7% of the vote. The party is traditionally a centre-right, socially conservative party focused on economic liberalism. The party had previously won a landslide majority in the 1978 election under its old name, however, this election was carried out under the supervision of apartheid South Africa and in defiance of the UN General Assembly’s 1972 resolution recognizing SWAPO as the legitimate representative of the region’s people.
The Independent Patriots for Change (IPC, *) is a political party founded by the runner-up candidate in the 2019 presidential race, Panduleni Itula, who ran as an independent in that election. The party supports grassroots democracy and has a strong stance against corruption. Economically, the IPC supports a mixed economy with a strong private sector and is critical of modern free trade policies. It also calls for free health care, expanded access to social services, wants to promote the use of domestic labourers in the economy, and calls for more public housing.
Finally, there is the Landless People’s Movement (LPM, left-wing). Traditionally, the LPM says its target constituency is the landless working class, urban dwellers, and people dispossessed by the Namibian government’s land policies. By and large, the LPM stands for social equality and promotes a strengthened private sector according to the party constitution.
The Other Parties
None of the eight remaining parties with parliamentary representation have more than two seats each due to the parliament’s electoral system. Because there is no official threshold, parties can win seats in the 104-seat National Assembly with under 1% of the popular vote, as happened with the South West Africa National Union (SWANU, left-wing) and Christian Democratic Voice (CDV, Christian fundamentalism). Of the parties currently in parliament, only one other party — the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP, liberal) — has managed to come in second place in a presidential election, in 2009.
The Presidential Race
Namibian presidents since 2015 have been subject to a two-term limit. To win an election outright, a candidate must win more than 50% of the vote. Otherwise, a second round is supposed to be held between the top two candidates. Since independence, no election has gone to a second round. The worst electoral performance by SWAPO in a presidential race was in 2019 when it won with just over 56% of the vote, down from almost 87% in 2014.
It was in 2019 that the independent candidate Panduleni Itula won almost 30% of the vote, the strongest vote share of any second-place candidate for president since independence. Itula recently announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election as did McHenry Venaani of the PDM.
If elected, the current SWAPO candidate Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah would be the first elected female president of Namibia.
Potential for a runoff?
SWAPO’s comparatively poor performance in the 2019 presidential race owes much to Panduleni Itula’s candidacy. Up until the 2019 election, Itula had been a member of SWAPO. Despite this, Itula won the endorsement of both the centre-right Republican Party and the left-wing Namibian Economic Freedom Fighters. This support is illustrative of the current IPC manifesto which borrows policy ideas from both liberal economics and a social-democratic style welfare state.
Ideologically, SWAPO is still one of the closest major parties to the IPC in terms of policy. After over 30 years of rule, there are signs that Namibians are looking for alternatives to SWAPO. Despite their relative similarities, the 2019 results suggest that most voters who backed Itula voted for a party other than SWAPO in the parliamentary election. Should Itula not make the runoff if one is held, he could play kingmaker in endorsing either the SWAPO candidate, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, or the next most likely candidate to make the runoff, McHenry Venaani. If on the other hand, the runoff is between Nandi-Ndaitwah and Itula, it is possible that Itula could garner enough of the opposition vote in round two to defeat SWAPO in the Presidential election for the very first time.
Conclusion
By and large, SWAPO is the clear favorite in this coming election. Not only have they dominated every election since independence, but the most recent polling from Afrobarometer suggests that they are on track to win both the presidential and parliamentary elections. The primary question is by how much. SWAPO currently sits on a knife’s edge regarding its ability to reclaim its two-thirds majority in parliament. And even if a runoff were triggered, the favorite to win would still be SWAPO’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah.
For these reasons, few surprises are expected come election day on November 27.