Leadership Quote by Helen Suzman

There is a particular sting in Suzman’s reversal: it’s not a theoretical climbdown, it’s a field report. “I used to be a fan” frames proportional representation as an attractive civic ideal - fairer, more inclusive, less winner-take-all. Then comes the pivot, blunt and almost weary: “not at all now I have seen it in action.” The line weaponizes experience against abstraction. Suzman isn’t rejecting reform out of conservatism; she’s warning that systems designed to broaden representation can, in practice, concentrate power in ways polite constitutional talk tends to ignore.

The subtext is party machinery. In many PR models, the voter selects a party, not a person; accountability flows upward to party leadership and list-makers rather than outward to constituents. For someone like Suzman - a liberal anti-apartheid MP who spent years as a principled minority voice in a hostile Parliament - the question of who an elected official answers to isn’t academic. It’s the difference between dissent that can survive and dissent that gets managed, disciplined, or quietly eliminated by the whip.

Context matters: South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement embraced PR to guarantee inclusion across a fractured society. Suzman’s quip reads as a late-stage skepticism about unintended consequences: factional gatekeeping, careerism, and leaders insulated from local pressure. The sentence works because it’s small, sharp, and institutional in its cynicism. It doesn’t deny the moral appeal of PR; it implies the moral appeal is exactly what lets its practical flaws slip through unchallenged.