Towards the end of August, during one of those “we’re the grown-ups” presidential addresses the party is fond of, DA leader John Steenhuisen said the DA would “not allow the ANC and its proxy parties to sabotage the future of our country”.
He was referring to the rolling mess in metro coalition politics. It did make me think; if the ANC has some difficult changes to make to prepare itself for either opposition or coalition government, you could argue that the DA has just as hard a journey.
The DA has said it will not consider a coalition government with the ANC. “Our project is to replace the ANC government, and we will see this project through,” Steenhuisen said in the same address. From a party that thinks hard about its communications that’s a clear message for voters, and logical enough given the decline of the country by every measure that matters. But I’m not sure it’s quite so simple, and I’m not sure the DA is being entirely honest with the electorate about the Catch 22 in which DA voters find themselves.
Under the current party policy, when the ANC loses its majority in 2024 the DA will need to team up with what some are referring to as a “grand coalition” of opposition parties. The problem for the DA is that so many parties and individuals that would need to join this grand coalition to unseat the ANC are a creation of the party’s own turbulent and sometimes rancorous history. They come not only with their own policies and ideas — something you ought to be able to manage in a coalition government — but virulent personal animus against the DA and its leadership.
Herman Mashaba’s (and Bongani Baloyi’s) Action SA, Patricia de Lille’s GOOD and Mmusi Maimane’s Build One SA will all have to be incorporated into a DA-led coalition. You can add to that Makashule Gana and Lindiwe Mazibuko, former DA heavyweights who have teamed up with Songezo Zibi and his political start-up, the Rivonia Circle, which will eventually morph into the political party it needs to become.
Inroads
Among them they count two former DA leaders, a former DA mayor of Johannesburg, a former DA mayor of Cape Town, a former DA mayor of Midvaal and a former DA shadow minister, all of whom left the party amid varying levels of acrimony and skandaal. Add the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), which makes no bones about what it is, and what you have is not so much a coalition but a pack of wolves making an alliance with a freshly fattened cow, and it seems to me to be more of an existential threat than an opportunity for collaborative government.
Perhaps I’m wrong on that, but if I’m not it does inevitably raise the question about the idea of a DA-ANC coalition. It is certainly easier in the short term for the DA to take the road of inflexibility on this — it will no doubt cite the FF+’s inroads into its voter base. But given the rancorousness of opposition politics I’m not so sure how much choice the DA actually has, and now might be the time for the party to grasp the nettle.
The bogeyman alternative would be an EFF-ANC coalition. This, I think, is the “proxy party” Steenhuisen was talking about. Racial national socialism is always wrong, so I’ll waste no ink explaining why having the EFF near levers of power would be a bad thing for everybody. But it’s worth noting that it would be especially bad for the DA’s white and other racial minority voters, and for its middle-class voters of all hues.
For the EFF, such an idea is officially taboo, but this is just strategic discipline in action, not principles. The EFF could be bought into an ANC-led government with some policy concessions, and no doubt there are elements in the ANC more than willing to make them to keep an anticorruption party — the DA — out of power.
Less corruption
The DA is caught between these various realities, and they all seem to suggest that strong leadership and clever communications could help the party make the argument, for its voters and those on the fence, that given these egregious alternatives an ANC-DA coalition might be best for DA voters.
After all, in that scenario — unpalatable as it will seem for many — a possibility of a government with less corruption, which the DA could monitor from as high up as the cabinet, more stability, which is good for anyone in the formal economy, and some kind of influence on the race-based legislation that works up the DA so.
Whether there is an opportunity for this after 2024 depends to some extent on what happens with the ANC at its elective conference at Nasrec in three weeks, but also on what happens in the next 18 months within the DA. It’s not clear whether this debate is really put to bed within the party, which finds its future coalition options limited by the human outcomes of its fraught recent history.
This is a difficult moment for the party. Can its current leaders walk such a delicate path while maintaining internal unity and keeping supporters onside? At some point it will need to bring voters into its confidence.
• Parker is Business Day editor-in-chief.
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