Whether political parties are seen to provide a real alternative consists not only of the policies they advocate, but more fundamentally whether voters feel they could trust that party to govern in the first place. The fourth Opinion '99 survey has repeated a wide range of questions about all the major political parties that we asked in the first survey in September 1999. Opposition parties have, for the greatest part, thus far failed to use their campaigns to make any appreciable improvements in the way they are seen by voters.
Few people see any of the opposition parties as ready to govern the country.
Low proportions of eligible voters think the opposition parties have performed well, as political parties. Only small proportions of voters see opposition parties as inclusive and representative of all South Africans. As a consequence, opposition parties are not seen as believable, or trustworthy. Finally, large proportions of the electorate remain unable to offer opinions about many of the attributes of the opposition, most specifically the Democratic Party, Pan Africanist Congress, Freedom Front and United Democratic Movement. Thus, alongside the fairly solid public evaluations of the way the ANC is governing the country, a second key point to understanding the likely outcome of the forthcoming election is that most voters do not see any credible alternative in any single opposition party.