Is the DA destined to always be an opposition party, or could it be a real alternative to the governing ANC?
It’s a question a French politician once put to Tony Leon, the party’s leader at the time. It was pertinent then — and remains so now, as the DA grapples with its place in South Africa’s political landscape, particularly in light of the serial missteps by the ANC.
But as South Africa heads towards a general election, can the DA make political hay from the multiple crises the ANC has bequeathed the country? Can it benefit electorally from the endemic corruption in the ruling party, which enabled more than a decade of state capture and blazed the trail for South Africa’s descent into a “mafia state”? In other words, can the DA capitalise on the ANC’s governance failures?
That question, DA federal council chair Helen Zille tells the FM, is simply wrong-headed. If the nation had heeded the party’s warnings from the start, South Africa might not be in the parlous position it finds itself in now.
Instead, the ANC’s “politics of racial nationalism, cadre deployment and centralisation of power” destroyed the promise of liberal democracy, she says. It underscored the creation of a “captured criminal state” and, now, a mafia state.
“It is harder and harder to turn a mafia state into a liberal democracy,” she adds. “The Democratic Party [the DA’s forerunner] and the DA warned against this vociferously, from the start — and even the media attacked us for doing so. Now it has all tragically come to pass, and the great irony is that the media is again implying that it is our fault that we are not ‘capitalising on the governance disaster of the ANC’.”
“If the media and the rest of the country had listened to our warnings from the start, we may not have degenerated into a mafia state.”
Still, she’s pragmatic about the DA’s future. “As they say, when you are building a democracy, the first 500 years are always the most difficult,” she says.
Upping the electoral ante
Of course, if it is to pose a real threat to the ANC’s electoral position, the DA needs numbers. And right now, those are a bit of a mixed bag.
The most recent round of elections — the 2021 local government poll — indicates some slippage in DA support. Taken together across the nation, its support in those elections was at 21.6% — down from the 24.5% in the 2016 local government polls.
Local elections aren’t directly comparable with national elections, but they are a useful barometer when it comes to reading the political temperature.
In any event, the national picture shows a decline too. In 2019, the DA’s support slipped to 20.7% from 22.2% in 2014. Support in its Western Cape stronghold fell from 57% in 2014 to 52% in 2019. It was a harsh wake-up call, prompting the party to overhaul its leadership and return to its liberal democratic roots on issues such as race and affirmative action.
So, has the DA turned a corner since?
As the party heads into its three-yearly federal congress this weekend, leader John Steenhuisen says he is satisfied that the picture is decidedly more stable than it was four years ago.
“I think the DA is far more healthy, both internally and externally, than we were in 2019. If I look at the unity of purpose of the federal executive, at the bedding down of a lot of the big internal fighting that was taking place in the public arena, the DA is a far more disciplined, focused organisation. And I think it’s far more orientated towards driving issues that matter to ordinary South Africans,” he tells the FM.
“I think that’s made all the difference.”
Still, the congress is going to have to formulate a coherent plan if it is to increase its share of the vote next year.
The DA’s own research has its support at 22% and above for the past 20 months. It reached a peak of 29%, but fell again as a result of the drama unfolding in Tshwane, where the party’s coalition has now fielded four mayors in seven years.
The Social Research Foundation, a new player in the political party polling game, is tracking the DA at 23.3%, according to a survey released on Monday.
But DA analyst and observer Gareth van Onselen, in a recent post on social media, paints a worrying picture about the party’s support. The DA “is losing legitimacy”, he says, pointing to losses in absolute numbers since 2014. For instance, between the 2016 and 2021 local government elections, the party shed 1.4-million votes; between the 2014 and 2019 national elections, it lost 470,000-odd votes.
“At some point soon, the DA must start to grow its actual vote share again,” he writes. “It can get 25% and some ostensible growth in the next election, but like the ANC, it will rest on shakier and shakier democratic ground if less and less people vote for it.”
The DA’s performance in by-elections since the 2021 local government polls has been grim, with the party even losing a ward in the Western Cape to the ANC. If by-elections are anything to go by, the party could even end up with less support than in 2019.
Independent elections analyst Dawie Scholtz, who closely tracks by-elections, has made some key observations about the DA’s support at the local level. Over the past two years, he says, the DA has lost support among the coloured community — to the Patriotic Alliance in particular. In the Western, Eastern and Northern Cape it is underperforming by between 10% and 25% among coloured voters. And among its white constituency it is losing support to the Freedom Front Plus and, to a lesser extent, to ActionSA.
But the bigger question, says Scholtz, is whether the party is winning support from black voters. That’s difficult to answer as — bar a few exceptions — the DA has shied away from contesting by-elections in largely black wards.
Still, while the overall numbers paint a bleak picture, they are somewhat mitigated by the party’s governance successes in the Western Cape and in Midvaal, Gauteng, and now in uMngeni (KwaZulu-Natal) and Mogale City (Gauteng).
In uMngeni, for example, popular DA mayor Chris Pappas has stabilised municipal finances after less than a year in office. In Stellenbosch, mayor Gesie van Deventer has made real strides in offsetting the power crisis, having seen how deeply the problem affected her constituency back in 2018 already.
“I was very unhappy about this,” she tells the FM. “I saw the impact it was having on communities, not just big business, but spaza shops in informal settlements. Single mums who relied on selling chickens or fresh produce were losing their stock and their livelihoods, I became very emotional about it.”
Working with the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research and the University of Stellenbosch, she began researching alternative sources of power. Slowly the council began adding solar panels to municipal buildings and traffic offices, claiming the easy, quick victories.
A plan to extract methane gas from refuse is now in the works, and Van Deventer is confident that by the end of the year the town will have reduced its load-shedding burden by two stages.
When it comes to the race to head off load-shedding, she is facing stiff competition from her Cape Town counterpart. The metro’s mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis, is also steaming ahead with plans to get the city off the grid.
These are just a few of the success stories in areas under DA control.
They’re important, says Steenhuisen, because the Western Cape — and places such as Cape Town and Stellenbosch in particular — will be “massive proof points into the next election, particularly when the big issue of the election is definitely going to be load-shedding”.
“Showing rather than telling is going to be a powerful message for us. It is far more powerful when you can say: ‘This is what we have done.’ These areas are going to be powerful tokens in the election, to say to the electorate, ‘this is what we can do where we are given a solid mandate’.”
Digging in its heels
So if the DA has ably illustrated that it can get governance right, when so many ANC-led governments are foundering, why does it seem to struggle to get voters onside?
The answer lies in the politics.
The FM canvassed DA insiders and analysts, asking why it is so hard for the party to leverage its own governance successes — and the ANC’s multiple and obvious weaknesses.
One leader says it boils down to a trust deficit: on the one hand, black voters lack confidence in the DA; on the other, young voters entering the electoral space are suspicious of the party, being unaware of its history. Many see it as a “white party” — a part of the “white apartheid apparatus” — the leader says, even though its various antecedents used their place in parliament to fight injustice.
“Of course, the recent departure of a number of black leaders does not help that perception,” the leader tells the FM, referring to former party leader Mmusi Maimane, former Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba, former Midvaal mayor Bongani Baloyi and Mbali Ntuli, a former DA MPL who challenged Steenhuisen for the party leadership in 2020.
It’s a view Leon echoes. “However good the DA may be in government is immaterial. Governance is not the only reason people cast their ballots,” he says.
“The DA has had about 23 years of a fairly hostile external environment where the label put on the party says ‘this is a white party’, and it can demonstrate and parade as many black leaders as it has, and you can look at its multiracial support base, and still somehow this perception [sticks].”
Of course, this image is not helped by the conduct of some of the DA’s own leaders. To take the most recent example, the party’s federal legal commission is investigating Cederberg municipality speaker John Hayes after he posted a picture on social media of a troop of monkeys appearing to steal a hubcap, with the words: “Be careful, the EFF strike started.” (A complaint of racism has also been laid against Hayes with the South African Human Rights Commission.)
One of the DA’s other albatrosses, says an analyst, speaking to the FM on condition of anonymity, is that the party made very “clear ideological choices when it chose not to include race in its economic policy”.
“If you ignore redress based on race and don’t acknowledge race, you are definitely toning down on trying to create an alternative to the ANC. If you make such ideological choices, you limit the space available to you, and your support is likely to get stuck in the late teens,” he says.
Another observer says the DA was clear in its most recent congress that it is a liberal democratic party — an ideological standpoint with limited support in South Africa.
Zille acknowledges that the party is “sowing [its seeds] on rocky ground”, but she is resolute on the issue. For her, the precepts of liberal democracy include nonracialism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, a market-based economy, and a capable and professional state that’s independent of the ruling party. It’s this, she says, that makes democracy work.
“We cannot compromise on these principles in an attempt to take a shortcut to power,” she says. “We will, for example, not embrace racial identity politics, which is in vogue right now. We will continue working to convince South Africans to support our core principles in order that South Africa can succeed. That support base is growing, but obviously we would like it to happen a lot faster.”
Only, the observer says, such intransigence is likely to count against the party. “There is a ceiling to the DA’s potential support at around 30%,” he says. “Whether the DA has exploited or mined all of that support is a key question.” When it comes to black voters, however, he believes there is already only about 15% of the constituency available to the DA, yet “its support among black South Africans remains between 5% and 6%”.
Turning the corner
Returning to the line from opposition to viable alternative government, Leon says: “There is a big difference between the two ... and there are a few steps the DA needs to take if it wants to make the transition.
“The DA has got to mine out every vote it can get. I don’t think they have mined out every vote they can get among their existing constituency. You go to every DA ward, look at how many people are registered, register those who are not,” he says. “It’s a simple exercise, but it can win the party a lot of votes.”
It’s particularly important in light of his view that the party’s ability to attract support is not without limits. If it is to bridge the gap between opposition and governing, it may have to consider forming a front or coalition with a number of stable and reliable partners.
The value here, at present, may seen negligible. Excluding the EFF, which Leon describes as a tributary of the ANC, the opposition’s share of the vote has remained steady at 34% from 1994 to 2023, with the DA holding the lion’s share of that. The issue is how to add more than 10% to that total. “I think the DA could play a big role in reimagining that alternative space,” says Leon.
For a start, it means opposition parties should stop cannibalising votes from each other, but instead co-operate and collaborate in a new way to create an alternative, and to steal votes off the ANC.
“Is there some arrangement that can be made to create a catchment area where disaffected ANC voters can be netted by various opposition forces, whether it’s the DA or another entity that the DA can collaborate with?” Leon asks.
The FM understands that DA donors have already been approaching potential and existing smaller parties to set up arrangements along these lines and that talks are continuing ahead of next year’s polls.
Zille, too, has long been preoccupied with the issue of the party’s growth. To that end, in her role as federal council chair, she’s been assisting DA-led coalitions across the country. While some have proven successful, coalitions in Gauteng have been disastrous.
Though Tshwane has traditionally been the DA’s most stable metro coalition, there’s been little continuity at the top level of the council even within the DA-led coalition. And its own coalition councillors — possibly even from within the DA — recently handed the council to an ANC-EFF alliance. That saw yet another mayoral switcheroo, with COPE’s Murunwa Makwarela taking office. (He quit both the mayoral post and his party after it was discovered he had forged a solvency rehabilitation certificate.) Then, late on Tuesday, former DA MP Cilliers Brink was elected mayor.
In Joburg, the DA also lost its governing position to an ANC-EFF alliance that propelled coalition partner Al Jama-ah’s Thapelo Amad into the mayoral seat. Al Jama-ah holds only three seats on the metro council.
In Zille’s view, the ANC is using the politics of extortion and bribery to take over the Gauteng metros. Coalition partner ActionSA would seem to be of a similar opinion: it has laid charges against a councillor in Tshwane for allegedly offering a coalition councillor a bribe of R2m to vote for an ANC/EFF-aligned mayor.
“This is, inherently, what makes these governments so unstable. The DA won’t resort to those kinds of methods,” Zille says. “We have to rely on the integrity and the commitment of our public representatives. But it is extremely difficult to hold a government together in these circumstances.”
It will be up to the incoming leadership of the party to map out the DA’s approach to coalitions after the congress, says Steenhuisen. In response to a question about a possible tie-up with even the ANC, he’s clear that “all options are on the table” for 2024.
In his view, there are two “nightmare scenarios” that may materialise in the wake of the 2024 election. In the first — the worst case, he says — the ANC retains a majority, but with the slimmest of margins (51% or 52%). “Then we end up in the territory of Robert Mugabe ... and you start to then see a radicalism and populist desperation”.
Such an eventuality, he believes, “will accelerate South Africa’s path to a failed state”.
A close second in the scenario stakes is an ANC-EFF coalition at national level. The concern, he says, is the “rabbit holes that the EFF has pulled the ANC down”: expropriation of land without compensation, nationalisation of the Reserve Bank, nationalisation of mines, prescribed assets. “If they’ve been that extractive as opposition, I think that we would be well on the way towards Venezuela- or Zimbabwe-style politics, if that coalition gets in,” he says.
The DA, he insists, will work to avoid either of these outcomes.
“And, you know, I really think, particularly a party like the ANC should be partnering in this to be able to bring stability, because it’s either them or us that is going to have to put something together in the post-2024 environment.”
But traditional coalitions are not the only alternatives, says Steenhuisen. He notes, for example, an option in which one party heads the executive, while another takes the legislative lead. Another is based around the politics of supply: parties don’t have formal agreements in place, but agree to support each other on key issues — motions of no confidence and in passing budgets, for instance.
“All options are on the table and, after the congress, we will be stress-testing all these scenarios,” he says.
One DA leader who is familiar with how coalitions can go horribly wrong is former Joburg mayor Mpho Phalatse. It’s her view that the DA has to be more flexible and practical about coalitions, while not compromising its principles.
Phalatse has her own ideas about building the party — and she’s putting them forward in her campaign for the post of DA federal leader. Running against Steenhuisen, she knows winning will be a long shot — he has the endorsement of most of the party’s provincial leaders — but she’s not fazed. She tells the FM that 2,000 delegates will be voting at the congress, and she has called each one of them to make known her proposals for taking the party forward.
Her platform in the leadership race is “growth, growth, growth”; she believes that if growth is targeted in the right way, the DA can dramatically increase its share of the vote.
“The DA lost over 1.4-million votes and 285 councillors lost their jobs in the last elections, we have to address this,” she says. “Let’s take the DA to non-traditional areas, rural areas, townships; let’s show them we are for them and explain liberal democracy to them ... I do believe there is a lot we can do to educate others about liberal democracy.”
Missing the boat
When it comes to the post-electoral political order, Social Research Foundation chair Frans Cronje believes opposition parties may already have missed the opportunity to bring the ANC into coalition territory at the national level.
The foundation’s research shows that the party is above the 50% + 1 threshold, polling at 52% with a 65% turnout — comparable with 2019. At the same time, he sees the DA’s support remaining on its pre-2019 trajectory.
Cronje doesn’t buy the popular perception that ANC voters are in an abusive relationship with the party — keeping it in power in the hopes that it will one day deliver on its promises. The party did well in the first 10 years of democracy, he says: it stabilised debt, built houses and rolled out electricity. But it stagnated during the Jacob Zuma years — and this began to show in falling electoral support, which reached 57% in 2019, from 63% in 2014.
But he warns that opposition parties shouldn’t count on load-shedding to win votes from the ANC: it’s likely that the power crisis will be managed until the polls, with renewable projects coming onstream and Eskom’s capacity being bolstered.
In any event, he believes the opposition parties have squandered their opportunity to replace the ANC — not least because of their rivalry.
Then there’s the awful audit outcome the DA-led coalition received in Tshwane. It was “as bad as any corruption anywhere else in the country, it was a terrible result”, he says. “The auditor-general found a series of irregularities in Tshwane’s books, with more than R10bn in irregular spending.”
That said, he reckons the DA has gone a long way to ensure it has a seat in any future coalition arrangement.
“Voters are way ahead and they are watching, it’s a lesson opposition parties need to learn. They have got to learn to work together, the DA has to learn to crowd in its opponents instead of alienating them,” he says.
This is one way in which the DA could become a real alternative government. But another, says Leon, is for the party to bring together an expansive platform of players for the purpose of mining the ANC’s support base. That, he adds, will require almost Mandela-like leadership.
“You don’t just need any leader to pull that off,” he says. “You need a statesman.”
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