GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Is the best thing for the DA to lose support in 2019?

Would the best thing for the DA in the long term be to lose some support in the short term?

It is a question worth interrogating, not merely because it is helpful to understand the possible advantages and disadvantages inherent to the DA losing support next year, but because it is an idea starting to take root in the thinking of some liberals, angry with and alienated from the DA.

Here is the DA’s problem: it is being systematically hollowed out as an organisation. It has a leader who is, essentially, conviction-less; unable to formulate or communicate a compelling vision; driven by compromise and capitulation; and who is generally held hostage to a party machinery that has taken on a life and authority of its own as a result of the leadership vacuum at the top of the party. 

As a consequence, the DA has seen its intellectual capital eroded, its liberal credentials weakened, and its policy bedrock slowly crack and break apart. In turn, it has been plagued by confusion, internal messiness and division.

Into that vacuum a number of impulses and forces have come into the ascendancy: a ubiquitous pandering to political correctness; dog-whistle politics on issues such as illegal immigration; a thinly-veiled obsession with demographic representivity and race; and the suppression of its values and principles in the face of populism — whereby its positions are polled, not argued.

After 10 years of ruinous governance under the ANC of Jacob Zuma, to grow by a few percentage points or less would be an indictment, not an endorsement

In short, the DA is a party of clichés and its leader is a mimic. Its messages are platitudes. Its organisational culture is increasingly defined by mediocrity. It doesn’t direct debate so much as respond to it. And for the past six months, if not longer, it has been held hostage by its own infighting, simply because it has nothing grander to offer. It is, ultimately, perceived by many as a nebbish.

A nice to have that exists primarily not to offend rather than to lead. 

None of this happened overnight, it was all brought into being on a piecemeal basis. Bit by bit. But a great many people have now invested a great deal in the status quo and, regardless of growing animosity in some quarters at the way things are headed, the powers that be will likely live or die by the election result in 2019.

Failure is an option

Should the DA grow, say by two or three percentage points, to about 25%, that might well be enough to delude the party faithful into believing all is well and good. More problematic still, if the DA does worse than that nationally — say it manages only incremental national growth — but succeeds in helping to bring the ANC below 50% in Gauteng, that might even be enough, as with the 2016 election results, to declare the DA’s election performance a triumph, at least to the media.

The truth is, neither would be anything but a failure. After 10 years of ruinous governance under the ANC of Jacob Zuma, to grow by a few percentage points or less would be an indictment, not an endorsement. It would represent a significant failure of leadership and negligible growth among black voters — the result of an inability to present the kind of compelling vision able to win and hold the hearts and minds of the many, many alienated ANC voters looking for an alternative.

But that wouldn’t matter for the DA leadership. Blame would be placed at the feet of more recent, entirely political crises — Helen Zille’s tweets, the drought or the Patricia de Lille mess — and the argument made by those with a vested interest in the result being understood as nothing less than a relative success, that this was the best that could have been done under the circumstances. 

And so, all of those problem alluded to — the factors that have contributed to the DA’s hollowing out — would be ignored as irrelevant or inconsequential and the Good Ship Mediocrity would be allowed to carry on its route to oblivion. Blame would have been suitably assigned to scapegoats and the institutional decay suitably patched over.

Against this backdrop, then, there would seem to be an argument to be made that the DA actually needs to lose support, for it to properly understand its condition. It is by no means an ideal scenario. One does not want to willingly weaken the opposition. But it is perhaps what is needed. Only a loss in support will result in the necessary crisis manifesting in the DA leadership and party, one where the direction in which the party is moving will be properly considered, and the role of those responsible properly interrogated. 

Excuses and scapegoating

That is not to rule out the possibility that, even then, the party’s various failings won’t be scapegoated. You can be sure those various excuses have already been carefully fed to the largely supine party structures, to make sure that, if things do go wrong, anyone but the leadership is blamed. And so, it is also quite possible that even a loss of support would not result in any meaningful interrogation.

If ever the DA needed a jolt out of the blue, so to speak, it is now, and it is difficult to imagine anything other than electoral damage delivering the appropriate message, in a way that really resonates. 

There are many people inside the DA who want to see the ANC re-imagined in the DA, and a loss of support might be just what they need

There are, however, a great many disadvantages to this.

There is a risk that any such loss in support will result in the argument being made, in some circles, that the problem is not that the DA panders too much to political correctness, say, but that it does not pander enough. Not that it flirts with demographic representivity and quotas, but that it has failed to fully embrace such ideas. The problem for these people is not that the DA has become some superficial version of the ruling party, but that it is not the ANC proper (at least ideologically, minus, as ever, the corruption and maladministration). 

There are many people inside the DA who want to see the ANC re-imagined in the DA, and a loss of support might be just what they need to take their current project to its ultimate conclusion.

There are other risks inherent to a loss in support. The biggest, perhaps, is the damage it might do to the DA’s long-term prospects. Former DA strategist Ryan Coetzee used to say the DA was like a shark, it needed to keep moving forward to stay alive. The DA has never yet had an election where it has shrunk. It would be a prospect entirely new to the party, and how it dealt with it and the subsequent private and public fallout would be telling.

But all of that aside, the problem remains that the DA is trapped in a bubble of delusion, its hostility towards external criticism means it only listens to the voices inside its own echo chamber, and they, naturally, keep telling the party everything is just fine, at least so far as the condition of the party, its leadership and its strategic direction is concerned. The only way to pop that bubble is to impose on the party some significant external truth. 

The fact that the DA seems set for marginal growth as it is, you would think would be enough for it to ask some very serious questions about its performance over the past five years. But election years are the worst years for introspection in a political party: everyone is concerned, first and foremost, about being re-elected. They have no real existential interest in the grand project, its purpose or nature. All they want are enough votes to ensure they get back inside. Then, perhaps, they are willing to have these sorts of difficult conversations. Until then, nothing should challenge their re-election.

What a mess

This sort of self-interest currently runs through the DA like a raging river. It’s always there, only it is surging at the moment. And, for the leadership, it is a torrent they wish to ride not hinder. It is typical of the pragmatic impulse towards expedience that has the party in its grip.

What a mess. The DA really is a bumbling, incoherent, directionless and haphazard collecting of competing interests these days. Much of this, if not all of it, boils down to the leadership — and all of the leadership at that. Political parties inevitably take on the characteristics of their leader. The DA has long since mirrored the conviction-less, compromising politics of Maimane. Its problem is that those traits are now very well ingrained. In some cases, even institutionalised. This is a very particular kind of danger, one that is particularly difficult to undo.

There is a worst-case scenario, whereby the DA does not just lose national support and fails to bring the ANC below 50% in Gauteng but loses control of the Western Cape too. It would be catastrophic, both for the DA and South African democracy. Now more than ever, we need a strong opposition. The damage that would do the long-term prospects of the DA would be almost too large properly to calculate. It is a remote scenario at the moment, but that it exists at all is telling. 

Political support for a given party goes through a number of phases when there is gradual decline in political leadership. It starts with animosity and discontent. We have seen our fair share of that with regards to the DA. It then shifts to apathy — and an attitude of “why bother to vote for the party?”. Finally, if unaddressed, it transforms into outright hostility whereby people actively vote for an alternative, or even set one up. Quite where the DA’s traditional, core supporter base sits on that spectrum is difficult to say but the point is, they are surely on it.

There is time to go until the election, and all the goodwill and enthusiasm that a multi-million-rand campaign can bring in the form of feigned unity and positivity, all delivered by a thousand posters and radio adverts. These things can make a difference and carry the day. The DA will be hoping it all goes to plan. If it does not, deeply troubling times lie ahead. And the risks inherent to this scenario are many and great. Rejuvenation and regression are both on the table. They really shouldn’t be.

The best-case scenario is the DA reaches its internal target of 27%, with that it retains the Western Cape and brings the ANC below 50% in Gauteng. That feels a long way off. In fact, you don’t really feel it at all.

But what the DA does feel is the great unknown. It seems to know there are problems, but it doesn’t quite know how to define them or who to ascribe them to. And that is the party’s problem: it is having an identity crisis at the exact point it needs certainty. 

One way or the other, the election will sort the wheat from the chaff. And the greatest threat inherent to whatever that result is, is that the DA can no longer tell which ingredient you make bread with and which ingredient you choke on. All it seems to know for sure is that it desperately needs a good yield. And that, no one would dispute.

• Van Onselen is the head of politics and government at the South African Institute of Race Relations.