DA at the 2024 electoral crossroads — hoping for the best, but also vulnerable

14 Feb 2024

The DA will launch its election manifesto this weekend and the upcoming polls will be crucial for the future of the party. After the elections, the DA could become an anchor member of a governing coalition or manage several provincial administrations. However, it could also lose momentum, especially if the EFF surpasses it as the official opposition — which is a possibility.

While the ANC and the DA often sound very different, they have some of the same problems going into the upcoming general election.

As the two biggest and most diverse parties in South Africa, they are both under pressure from the right and the left flanks. Former voters of both parties have switched allegiance to smaller parties campaigning on a narrow set of issues and focusing on a particular class, language or ethnic group.

Both parties have lost a stream of former members as our politics continues to fracture and lose cohesion. Intriguingly, both will face new political formations headed by their former leaders: Jacob Zuma and the uMkhonto Wesiswe (MK) party, and Mmusi Maimane with his Build One SA (Bosa).

One of the challenges the DA faces is building a narrative that will continue to attract voters from across the spectrum. While its recent conference showed a large gathering of members who represented South Africa’s diversity, they voted into office a 10-person leadership that is overwhelmingly white.

While this may be the result of a democratic process, it will still be easy for the ANC and other parties to label the DA as a “party for white people”.

This has consistently been the DA’s problem — despite its stated intent to represent the whole country, it has been unable to demonstrate this to voters through its leadership.

While the DA does have some control over that narrative, it has almost no control over how Israel’s invasion of Gaza is affecting our politics.

The party’s nature has laid it open to attack, as it has leaders, members and supporters who feel a strong sense of solidarity either with Palestine or Israel. As previously noted, this is very difficult for the DA to manage and, with the national government pressing the International Court of Justice to take action against Israel, will continue to divide the party.

In the past, a major plank of the DA’s campaign strategy was to encourage people to vote for it simply as a way to stop the ANC.

‘Stop Zuma’

It gained votes through this, all the way from 1994 until the 2016 local elections.

This momentum strengthened in 2009 when the DA started its “Stop Zuma” campaign.

The high-water mark of this was probably the 2016 local government elections. Then, with middle-class frustration with Zuma’s government increasing after the sacking of Nhlanhla Nene as finance minister, voter turnout in the suburbs increased dramatically, while declining in the townships.

This put the DA in the driving seat in the creation of coalitions and saw Herman Mashaba being hoisted aloft as the first DA mayor of Joburg.

However, after Zuma left office, the DA lost momentum and shed votes in the 2019 elections, particularly in Gauteng, where it had been so successful just three years previously.

This suggests that the DA benefited from Zuma’s time in office and found it harder to contest against President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Back then, this analysis elicited a furious reaction from the chair of the DA’s Federal Council, Helen Zille, who said the DA grew through its actions rather than those of Zuma.

If true, this means that if the DA continues to lose support it will be because of its actions rather than those of opposing parties.

This could explain the tetchiness of some DA leaders. It has become common for the party to demand a right of reply to opinion pieces written about it and then to weaponise these replies for campaigning purposes — perhaps a sign of desperation.

However, while the DA can no longer claim that people must vote for it to “stop the ANC”, it can replace that message with the claim that it is now possible to remove the ANC from power.

This is related to the impact that the DA-led Multi-Party Charter could have on voter turnout. While each of the parties in the pact has its constituency, the fact that they are working together and the prospect of real political change could lead to more people voting for opposition parties than ever before.

The DA, the IFP and ActionSA stand to gain from this dynamic.

However, not everything is positive for the DA and several recent polls indicated the EFF could come close to removing it as the official opposition.

Were this to happen, it could mark the beginning of the end for the DA, which would battle to recover from such a blow.

However, the DA and others have correctly pointed out that it is a strange feature of our society that opinion polls taken in the suburbs provide less accurate results than polls in other areas. Some of those polls might have underestimated the DA’s share of the vote.

One of the biggest challenges the DA faces is to be heard above the noise of the other, newer political players. Its manifesto will have to provide a clear picture of its vision and a slogan that can shape the narrative of this election. DM

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‘Stop Zuma’