Politics
The municipal council consists of eleven members elected by mixed-member proportional representation. Six councillors are elected by first-past-the-post voting in six wards, while the remaining seven are chosen from party lists so that the total number of party representatives is proportional to the number of votes received. In the election of 18 May 2011 no party won a majority on the council, with five seats going to the African National Congress (ANC), four to the Democratic Alliance (DA) and one each to the Congress of the People (COPE) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The ANC formed a coalition with the PAC to govern the municipality. However, later in 2011 one DA ward councillor resigned from the party, triggering a by-election in which he stood for the ANC and won, giving the ANC an absolute majority of six seats on the council.
The following table shows the results of the 2011 election.
| Party | Votes | Vote % | Seats | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ward | List | Total | ||||
| African National Congress | 11,510 | 45.0 | 4 | 1 | 5 | |
| Democratic Alliance | 9,680 | 37.9 | 2 | 2 | 4 | |
| Congress of the People | 2,436 | 9.5 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |
| Pan Africanist Congress | 1,309 | 5.1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | |
| Independent | 510 | 2.0 | 0 | – | 0 | |
| The People's Independent Civic Organisation | 125 | 0.5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 25,570 | 100.00 | 6 | 5 | 11 | |
| Spoilt votes | 518 | |||||
The local council sends two representatives to the council of the West Coast District Municipality: one from the ANC and one from the DA.
Read more about this topic: Cederberg Local Municipality
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“All is politics in this capital.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)