GARETH VAN ONSELEN: Three DA scenarios after the election

As things stand — and barring some kind of black swan event — the DA seems headed for about 22% in the 2019 election. Whichever way you cut that, it is not a great result. But, depending on whether it finishes just below or just above 22% — the same percentage it secured in 2014 — a range of different responses inside and outside the party are likely.

Here are three possible scenarios: the first flows from the DA getting below 22% — say about 20%; in other words, its support levels drop. The second would see the DA ending on 22% or thereabout — in other words, stagnation. And the third would stem from some small growth, up to say 24% — not enough to claim the campaign a wild success, but enough perhaps, to save face.

Backdrop

Before we do that, a few more general observations.

A possible result in this election, so far as the “big three” political parties are concerned, is that the EFF is the only party to grow, certainly to grow in any meaningful way (admittedly off a relatively small base). Both the ANC and the DA could decline. The ANC’s potential decline is significant so far as the DA is concerned. The much-vaunted reformation of the ANC cannot be used as an excuse for the DA’s poor performance if it falls below the 62% it garnered in 2014.

In turn, the truth of the matter is that, whatever the outcome for the DA, the problems responsible for its relatively poor performance will be the same. The DA will recognise or not recognise those problems depending on the nature of the result (if it grows, it will inevitably brush most of them under the carpet) but, whatever its respective response, the problems remain. 

The DA’s primary problems

Although not comprehensive, some of the primary problems are as follows:

• The leader: Weak and ineffectual, internally and externally, a lack of authority and decisiveness, equivocation, unable to define the party’s vision and purpose in a consistent, clear and principled fashion, to operationalise that vision or to unite the party behind it.
• The federal leadership: In particular, the chair of the federal executive and the CEO, both responsible for operationalising the party’s vision. The absence of any discernible strategy is a consequence of the lack of clarity around the party’s vision and purpose.
• Anti-intellectualism: The hollowing out of the party’s intellectual core in the name of “activism”. Thus, the almost total halt in the party’s ability to produce substantive position papers, analysis or policy. As a result, an over-reliance on temporary sloganeering and marketing, driven primarily by polling not principle.
• Policy and issues: The lack of a defining policy framework and, as a result, the party’s inability, over a long period of time, to own meaningful issues (like the economy) and determine and drive public debate. In turn, much ideological confusion and contradiction on key issues like the economy, empowerment, race and free speech. In this vacuum, the party has relied on appropriating the ANC’s history above its own. It is more concerned with trying to be the “true” vanguards of Nelson Mandela’s vision than the vision of its own forebears. 
• Communications: A generally mediocre communications machine, that has become almost entirely reactive and devoid of substance. A lack of message control (Schweizer-Reneke) and the inability to pre-empt debate and control the narrative. Thus, a large portion of DA communication is damage control.
• Subversion of control: The party staff now, by and large, determine the DA’s direction. Public representatives are almost wholly subservient to the operational machine. They might argue over direction, but only within the parameters of what has been predetermined. Likewise, there has been an ideological shift. Rumours are that the provincial and national lists are going to see a wholesale purge of liberal DA members, unless the federal executive intervenes. If not, the party’s gradual philosophical shift towards a more nationalistic, race-driven character could be fully augmented.
• Internal division: As a consequence of the above, a range of competing interest groups exist inside the party — the federal leadership at odds with one another, the national caucus often at odds with the leader, provincial leaders at odds with the federal leadership, ideological factionalism, and the party machine — the staff — at odds with public representatives.
• Infighting: A vast array of fall-outs and controversies involving high-profile individuals that have subsumed any other narrative from the DA.

Each of these flows from the other: a leader’s job is to define and articulate the party vision. If that is confused and contradictory — and many people today struggle to define what the DA stands for, producing labels such as “ANC lite” — that vision cannot be operationalised. 

When that failure is supplemented by mediocrity, anti-intellectualism, a lack of strategy and a relentless pandering to ANC history and policy, the result is division and confusion. The public experiences the party as both nebulous and wracked by internal discord.

That list, therefore, represents the true hierarchy of the DA’s problems. As with any organisation, they flow from the top, down. However, the closer the scenario moves towards decline, the more likely it is the list above will be inverted, as a list of excuses for the DA’s shortcomings. In other words, if the DA loses support it is more likely to start at the top of list, but if it grows, it will start at bottom, blaming the symptoms, not the root cause.

The three scenarios

This is how the three scenarios identified are likely to play out in terms of realpolitik inside the DA.

Scenario 1: About 20% and a decline

Nothing imposes meaningful introspection upon a party more effectively than a decline in support. A clear loss in support will force some honest reflection. And the first place the party will look is at the leadership. 

Any political leadership is at its weakest following a bad election result. And a bad result thus constitutes the moment when competing factions make their play.

The DA has a problem on this front. It has put all its eggs in the Maimane basket, to an almost fanatical degree. Simultaneously, the DA suffers a dearth of alternative leaders. Because Maimane is perceived as a blank slate, he is seen as less threatening than those below him, who have far more conviction.

Thus there is a possibility he will be spared any direct wrath and attention will turn to the chair of the federal executive and the CEO. There might well be some bloodletting. That is not to say Maimane will necessarily be spared — there are large sections of the DA profoundly unhappy with him — only it could take a federal congress for that to result in any actual change.

Provincial leaders, many of whom — in Gauteng and the Western Cape in particular — have played a fundamental role in the DA’s decline, will be spared any meaningful cross examination. This is primarily because they constitute an ever-more determining power block in their own right. That, however, would be a serious mistake.

The greatest threat inherent to a loss of support for the DA is that it is something the party has never experienced before. That is a recipe for panic. And, if that takes holds, there is the possibility of real internal chaos.

Scenario 2: About 22% and stagnation

Stagnation might be just enough to avoid any bloodletting. The inclination of the leadership will be to scapegoat the DA’s problems and blame them almost entirely on infighting and public fall-outs — issues such as Patricia de Lille and Helen Zille.

The thing to understand about the likes of Patricia de Lille and Helen Zille — who seems currently to be running her own parallel “tax revolt” election campaign — is that they are both products and symptoms of the DA’s current condition, not separate from it, along with a great many other DA problems.

Make no mistake, the leadership will play that card even if the DA declines in support, but there will be less appetite for it under those circumstances.

If the DA stagnates, scapegoating might well work as an excuse. The public, largely unaware of the extent of the internal crisis in the party, is more likely to buy those kinds of explanations too. If the DA gets away with it, it will then fully augment its long-term collapse. Because without an honest conversation about its problems, they will inevitably manifest the DA’s slow implosion over time.

Scenario 3: About 24% and small growth

If the loss of support is a political catalyst for honesty, growth is a political incentive for dishonesty.

This result is thus potentially the most dangerous for the DA. There can be no universe where, after 10 years of ruinous ANC governance, small growth is a triumph. But expectations are now so low inside the DA, it will nevertheless be received as a massive vindication of the DA’s performance and leadership (that is the inevitably consequence of a culture of mediocrity). And, if the DA can help bring the ANC below 50% in Gauteng to boot, any hope of meaningful introspection will evaporate overnight.

The result will be touted as a huge victory and the DA’s approach presented internally and externally as entirely correct. Its problems will be glossed over as no more than “challenges” and it will continue, under Maimane, to devolve into an indistinct and ultimately uncompetitive national force for change.

The fact that the growth was small will be scapegoated in the same fashion it would be in scenarios 1 and 2, but the appetite to believe this as true will be insatiable, and it will all be swallowed up wholesale.

On the upside, unlike scenarios 1 and 2, such a result might buy the party some small measure of internal unity, for a short period of time. In the other two scenarios, those pre-existing internal divisions are more likely to manifest in action (scenario 1) or fester indefinitely (scenario 2).

Conclusion

The two things that tells you everything about the DA’s current situation are the following: the ANC’s national vote share is in decline; and the DA’s greatest enemy in this election is apathy among its own, existing support base. 

Those two things tell a story of a party that, in the wake of the greatest gift a governing party could deliver to an opposition — 10 years of catastrophic rule — could not get its own supporters enthused about it. It is the symptom of an internal political culture that does not know what it is and how to properly distinguish itself, thus which is unable to externally present itself and capture hearts and minds to a significant degree.

Whatever the result, these are problems the party needs to have an honest conversation about and, you would hope, change. But vested interests and low expectations will likely act as significant obstacles to those things ever being properly addressed.

In the final analysis, the DA has trapped itself in a corner. It has invested everything in a weak leader, who has produced a weak organisation, all of which is held together by a millenarian narrative that it is held hostage to. At the same time, it has weakened itself to the extent that almost every key powerbroker is complicit in its decline.

That does not bode well for introspection but rather will generate closed thinking and stubborn denial. It would seem, then, it is now just a matter of how that denial plays itself out.

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