8 - Popular Politics and Publics during the 2013 General Elections

Summary

Elections are moments when political hierarchies and differences become more visible and more contestable. Chapter 8 examines how the people’s parliaments responded to the 2013 General Elections in Mombasa. It reveals how instrumental and personalised political campaigns had a tense but mutually constitutive relationship with everyday publics. The intrigues of electoral competition sparked interest in public discussion and made it seem relevant to people’s everyday lives, while at the same time sharpening the contours of debate. A key finding concerns the challenges that faced civil society campaigns in attempting to realise changed discourses. This chapter argues that peace narratives purported by civil society in 2013 struggled to shift deep-set shared imaginaries. Explicitly non-partisan civil society groups struggled to keep out partisan competition as it was a source of perceived individual agency in politics. Also, formal structures were easily instrumentalised by politicians within their campaigns.