‘Land reform stance may have caused COPE’s loss of support’

The Congress of the People’s(COPE) support has continued to drop with the party falling from 0.6% to 0.3% since the 2014 elections with 33% of the national voting districts declared.

This is a far cry from the days of the party that garnered over 7% of the vote countrywide when it first contested the 2009 elections.

Political Analyst Somadoda Fikeni attributes the party’s loss of support to the bruising internal battles in the first five years of its existence but most recently to its stance on land reform.

He says: “It seems to have taken a very unpopular position on the land matter when all other parties that are mainly having black constituencies were saying the land redistribution is key. They went to the extreme of having a partnership with an Afrikaner lobby group that was dead set against any kind of redistribution.”

“They even said there was no land that was ever taken. So I do think these are some of the things that have actually afflicted COPE.”