A Look at History via Election Posters

Viv Vermaak

– October 26, 2026

4 min read

From “A Better Life for All” to “Freedom, Federalism, and Free Enterprise”, South Africa’s election posters reveal much about a country’s aspirations through two of its most prominent parties. For while political slogans change with the times, the promises beneath them are harder to escape.

It would be a mistake to think of election posters as disposable pieces of mass-produced propaganda. While the printwork gets bleached by the sun or the cardboard recycled as makeshift housing or firewood, the messages outlive the campaigns that produced them.

Consider two defining political messages of democratic South Africa during our initial democratic elections: the promise by the African National Congress (ANC) of “A better life for all” and the emphasis of the then-Democratic Party (DP) on “Freedom, Federalism and Free Enterprise”. They emerged from different political traditions and offered different routes to the future. Three decades later, the promises still feel relevant to what their supporters want, but somehow delivery too has been bleached by time.

The ANC’s promise was broad enough to unite a country emerging from an extraordinary injustice. Its political strength lay partly in its ambiguity. A better life could mean different things to different people, allowing millions of South Africans to invest their hopes in a common future. A better life remains an aspiration. The question is whether the political machinery tasked with delivering it has kept pace with the country’s needs.

The DP’s original emphasis on “Freedom, Federalism, and Free Enterprise” offered a different set of answers. Its language was less sweeping, more ideological, and arguably less immediately accessible to voters whose most pressing concerns were poverty, unemployment, and inequality.

Freedom spoke to individual rights and personal choice. Federalism offered a way to distribute political authority rather than concentrate it in the national government. Free enterprise proposed that economic opportunity depended, in part, on allowing individuals and businesses to create wealth without unnecessary state interference. These were not merely campaign decorations. Together, they articulated a view of how a society should organise itself, where power should reside and how prosperity should be created. The question is whether the Democratic Alliance (DA), the DP’s political and ideological successor, should possibly have delivered more directly on these promises, even on current election posters.

Decline

In the 1994 election, the ANC won 62.65% of the national vote. In 2024, it received 40.18%, losing its parliamentary majority for the first time in democratic South Africa. The decline does not erase the party’s historic role in liberation, nor does it mean that every element of its record can be reduced to a slogan. It does, however, demonstrate that political authority accumulated through history cannot indefinitely substitute for present-day delivery. The party of liberation has faced formidable challenges.

Similarly, the liberal grouping, now headed by the DA, walked its own long road. In 1994, the DP received just 1.73% of the national vote, garnering seven seats in the National Assembly. Five years later, it won 9.56% and became the official opposition. The DA, its successor, subsequently expanded its support, reaching 22.23% in 2014. It won 20.77% in 2019 and 21.81% in 2024. Once a relatively small opposition party, it is now the official opposition nationally and a participant in the Government of National Unity. No longer the official opposition, it is a position in which cooperation, compromise, and accountability must coexist.

This is where the old posters become interesting again. Perhaps that is the enduring lesson of South African electioneering; slogans are designed to simplify politics, but governing a diverse, unequal, and complex country is anything but simple. Freedom without opportunity can feel hollow. Economic growth without broad participation can leave the promise of a better life unfulfilled. Political representation without accountability can become an end. The old slogans have not necessarily become obsolete. They have become tests to which the electorate hold each party.

The official ANC slogans for the 2026 election are less ambitious in their promising scope. Under the theme “Masakhe” (Let us build), the core rallying slogan is “Let’s continue building better communities together.” In keeping with its positioning over the years, it uses inclusive, positive wording.

The DA is going with "Stop the chaos. Start service delivery.” This is opposition talk, perhaps a precursor to a more turbulent political future.

Both parties, in different ways, are being asked to demonstrate that their founding promises mean something beyond the posters on which they are printed. That is a more demanding proposition than nostalgia. Principles become meaningful when they survive contact with the compromises of political office.

South Africa’s political posters will change again before the next election. The colours will be brighter, the fonts larger, and the promises more urgent. But beneath the familiar language lies a question that no party can avoid indefinitely: what has changed in the lives of the people whose votes it seeks? We should not look for answers on lampposts, but rather in the country that remains after the posters come down.

Vivienne Vermaak is an award-winning journalist and keynote speaker. She is an associate of the Free Market Foundation. She writes in her personal capacity.