Picture of politics: DA in free fall, but Steenhuisen pins his hopes on 22 May 'virtual rally'

First published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.

It was a week in which surely nothing could dislodge the ANC’s top brass from the negative headlines. Until a video went viral on 6 May showing the DA’s Gauteng leader Solly Msimanga apparently being assaulted by a man who accused Msimanga of owing him more than a million rand.

The incident epitomised the kind of unwanted drama the DA seems unable to shake off right now. The Msimanga video surfaced just days after the Weekend Argus revealed that yet another senior DA figure – Xanthea Limberg, City of Cape Town mayoral committee member for water – stands accused of having falsified her CV. The Limberg allegation comes in the wake of the forced resignation of Western Cape DA leader Bonginkosi Madikizela after DM168 revealed he had lied about his qualifications.

Amid a flurry of bad PR, party leader John Steenhuisen seemed determined to generate some positive hype. A “special announcement” was promised to media – which took the form of a video showing Steenhuisen announcing a “virtual rally” in front of lacklustre youth waving South African flags. The video was panned on social media. It also caused distress within the party, DM168 is reliably informed, where it was considered in some quarters to be both embarrassing and politically tone-deaf.

Part of the intention of the video was to inform South Africans that the DA is focused and “marching forward” towards the local government elections on 27 October. But the picture that emerges from DM168’s interviews with party figures is quite different.

“People are saying it’s not worth working for this election because it doesn’t matter what we do on the ground – our leadership and national structures keep messing up and morale is at an all-time low,” said a DA activist who asked not to be named.

Steenhuisen denies this.

“Morale may have been low after the 2019 [election] performance and the events thereafter,” the party leader told DM168. But he says that since the DA’s 2020 policy conference and elective conference that confirmed his leadership, the party has “regained its ideological footing”, with its structures “energised and determined”.

Electoral dysfunction

It has long been Steenhuisen’s claim that the party only needed to shake off the ideological ambiguity that characterised the leadership of his predecessor, Mmusi Maimane, and its course would be steadied once more.

Yet the electoral losses that have plagued the DA for the past two years have not been stemmed by Steenhuisen’s stewardship.

“The DA’s performance in by-elections has not been very good for the past couple of rounds, and there have been some car-crash losses,” elections analyst Wayne Sussman told DM168.

In the Super Wednesday by-elections held in November 2020, as was widely publicised, the DA surrendered nine wards and gained just two. In by-elections held since, the party has fared somewhat better, but still experienced significant drops in vote share. This slump has been particularly pronounced among coloured and Indian voters.

Observed data-cruncher Dawie Scholtz said on Twitter: “In every by-election in predominantly coloured areas for the last year, the DA has been experiencing [10% to 30%] swings against it.”

Steenhuisen does not deny the trend, but terms it part of a global phenomenon in which, in times of uncertainty, “people retreat into the laagers of race and ethnicity because they feel safe there”.

Recent by-election results show that both the DA and the ANC are losing support among coloured and Indian voters to smaller parties like the Patriotic Alliance and Al Jama-ah, while Afrikaans voters continue to turn to the Freedom Front Plus.

“One of the only safe spaces for the DA at the moment is white English-speaking suburbia,” says Sussman.

“That and – with some exceptions – urban coloured voters in Cape Town.”

Instability of leadership

The leadership team of John Steenhuisen and the party’s federal council chair Helen Zille is sometimes painted as having an iron hold over the DA’s current direction. But insiders say this is not quite accurate.

Zille was described to DM168 as being currently “totally distracted” by efforts to promote her self-published book #StayWoke Go Broke, a work described as an explanation of “why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa’s future than the populist Right does”.

Insiders say the book itself is causing unhappiness among the party’s younger activists, who fundamentally disagree with Zille’s conclusions and fear that the DA at large will suffer from the association.

“The in-fighting is at an all-time high, hence all the leaks and dramas,” DM168 was told, in a reference to the fingers pointed at numerous other DA figures after the Madikizela qualifications scandal.

“It all points to no real control or focus of the party.”

Internal disputes are likely to coalesce around the contest for mayoral nominations in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Tshwane. It has already been suggested that the information about Madikizela’s CV was leaked in order to eliminate him from the race for Cape Town’s mayoral chain to pave the way for a win for Zille and Steenhuisen’s preferred candidate, MP Geordin Hill-Lewis.

In Gauteng, a bigger problem is the lack of household names to serve as mayoral candidates – the issue that businessman Herman Mashaba was recruited to solve, before his relationship with the party went south in 2019. In Johannesburg, it is expected that either DA caucus leader Leah Knott or councillor Mpho Phalatse will win the party’s nomination, but there are concerns that neither has the required visibility or excitement factor to galvanise the city’s voters ahead of the October by-elections.

A rally good idea?

Can Steenhuisen’s “virtual rally”, scheduled for 22 May, pull the party together as it begins campaigning in earnest for the October local government elections?

The DA leader told DM168 that the event would showcase the “ground-breaking” technological innovation that the party has been pioneering since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will also “officially kick off the campaign season”.

There are hopes within the party that the ANC’s Ace Magashule-related chaos will be a sufficient turn-off to South African voters to send them flocking to the DA in October. But there is little doubt that the DA will have its work cut out for it regardless of the shenanigans in the governing party. DM168

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.