The Elections in Shoshong, 2024: The Consequences of Defection

Abstract

The 2024 elections in Shoshong offer an opportunity to examine how the defection of an elected member of Parliament (MP) from an opposition to the ruling party affects the local political landscape. Shoshong was a long-standing ruling party stronghold until 2019, when the parliamentary seat and a majority of the district council wards were won for the first time by the opposition coalition, the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC). Less than three years later, the MP defected from the opposition to the ruling party, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). None of the senior UDC office-holders or elected councillors in the constituency followed him. This appears to have accentuated the usual conflicts within parties (especially the ruling BDP) over candidate selection – and then who supported who in the run-up to the subsequent elections. In the 2024 elections, the UDC maintained its domination of the constituency by winning seven out of nine council seats as well as the parliamentary seat, thereby ousting the defector. But the UDC’s share of the council vote in 2024 was marginally lower than in 2019 and its share of the parliamentary vote was lower. Whilst the poor performance of the BDP was in large part due to factors exogenous to the constituency, particularly the countrywide resurgence of the UDC and the expansion of the BPF, it seems unlikely that the defector took many supporters with him. In this constituency, in these elections, party proved more important than the individual candidate.