DA wants to amend Constitution on floor-crossing

The Democratic Alliance will submit a private member's bill in Parliament today to amend the Constitution so that public representatives will no longer be able to change parties while retaining their seats in the so-called floor-crossing procedure. DA-leader Tony Leon says the way the ANC has enacted the ruling has perverted the original intention, which was to weaken the hold of party bosses over public representatives. He says floor-crossing has succeeded only in encouraging the lowest form of cheque-book politics, increasing the ANC's dominance and fragmenting the opposition. The Inkatha Freedom Party’s chief whip, Koos van der Merwe, has put forward a similar private member's bill. But the Institute for Democracy in South Africa analyst Jonathan Faull says while Idasa was consistently against floor-crossing, he had yet to see a private member's bill succeed. He says the DA supported the legislation when it came before Parliament, and one would ask what has led them to change their mind. Faull says the shadow of the floor-crossing period in September next year and the threat of possibly losing the Cape Town metro as a result, as it did in 2002, was weighing heavily on the opposition’s mind.