Quite simply because we wanted to explore how governments respond and develop after you drop your vote into the ballot box, we decided on “Beyond the box” as the theme of this edition of The Cape Town Globalist. If the act of marking an ‘X’ next to a party’s name is a symbol of a citizen’s empowerment and engagement with society, then the box represents the electorate’s entitlement to be heard and their demands attended to.

2009 has seemed like ‘Election Year’ worldwide, the South African election being the most prominent for The Cape Town Globalist, for obvious reasons. Without being parochial, we hope – we are a global magazine, after all – the choices and decisions to be made dominated our minds for a while, more so than the events unfolding around other elections. Leading up to the day, the biggest question on many South Africans’ minds (and it was tangible and felt important) must have been, “To lump for the tried and tested opposition, or to follow the spark of something new?” The results showed that, in the end, many voters did veer from their past stoic support of the ruling part, the African National Congress (ANC), choosing the Congress of the People (Cope) instead. What’s more, the results indicated a change in the political status quo as minority parties look to have become increasingly irrelevant in the grander picture. Ultimately, Cope, still only about seven months old and currently floundering as high-level members drop from their ranks, have planted a seed of change. They may prove not to be the grand wind of change to sweep the South African political landscape, but that role will undoubtedly be taken up – perhaps in a year’s time, perhaps in two – by another, well structured party with a resolute and focused leadership.

That’s just South Africa, though. What of the rest of the world? There has been the Iranian election, the Israeli election, and last year, the US election which somehow retains its significance even as time passes. Barack Obama’s move to the White House is a symbol of change and of the power voters yield.

A number of elections have passed off this year without incident, but many more have resulted in anger and violent protests. “Beyond the box” works as a theme precisely because there’s so much ‘bad stuff’ to analyse and discuss. The proactive and forward looking magazine that we are, however, we’ve tried to focus on alternatives and opportunities for electoral change as much as possible. Read more about it in “When Elections Don’t Work”, but in the words of Justice Kriegler, former chairperson of South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission in 1994, ultimately “honesty is what the electorate demands”. Maybe we’re all idealists to expect that from every politician around the world, but sometimes a shot of High Hopes is exactly what’s needed. How else to keep the bar high for a country’s leaders? Indeed, how else to keep the man in the street from slipping into complacent acceptance of ‘the way things are’?

Enjoy the magazine and good luck for the semester ahead! The Globalist is becoming more and more entrenched in UCT culture and, having recently formed a partnership with the excellent History and Current Affairs Society, you’ll be seeing a lot more of us in the coming weeks.

Cheers,

Duncan