There is a growing unease within the DA about its participation in the government of national unity (GNU).
While the party entered the arrangement to provide stability, reformist pressure and accountability, many within its ranks question whether it has meaningfully influenced the direction of government at all. Instead, the prevailing perception is that the ANC continues to set the policy agenda while the DA offers the occasional protest that rarely translates into concrete change.
This concern goes beyond the usual discomfort of compromise politics. At its heart is the fear the DA has traded strategic leverage for proximity to power. The GNU has not produced a decisive recalibration of core ANC policies. On these defining issues, continuity rather than reform has prevailed. The DA’s participation, critics argue, has lent legitimacy to an unchanged policy trajectory without extracting sufficient concessions in return.
Compounding this unease is the growing perception that those DA leaders who have been co-opted into executive positions appear increasingly comfortable within government.
Ministerial posts bring bigger salaries, prestige, influence and access, and there is a sense among grassroots members that these incentives may be dulling the party’s oppositional edge. After all, politics is not only about outcomes but about posture and credibility. When a party that built its brand on accountability and ethical governance appears reluctant to rock the boat, its moral authority inevitably erodes.
Opposition parties exist to clarify choices for voters, to sharpen alternatives and to force governing parties to negotiate reform on substantive terms.
The controversy surrounding John Steenhuisen’s acquittal by the party’s federal legal commission over the misuse of a DA credit card has further inflamed internal tensions. While formally resolved, the episode is widely viewed by critics as an exercise in damage control rather than transparency.
The timing, on the eve of a crucial internal congress and ahead of local government elections, has fuelled suspicion that party unity is being prioritised over accountability. For a party that has long claimed ethical superiority over its rivals, the optics are particularly damaging as the laager is seen to be closing to protect its increasingly belly-full chief.
At the same time, a growing cohort within the DA points to figures such as Dion George as emblematic of an alternative path – a political weathervane not blown by opportunism, but a signpost toward principled engagement. This group is increasingly critical of what they describe as toenadering, a drawing close to power motivated by position rather than principle.
Coalition politics, they argue, should not become a technocratic exercise in accommodating poll arithmetic. Instead, principles, whatever they may be, should define the red lines that make genuine political contestation possible.
The danger for the DA is not merely internal fracturing, but also strategic dilution. Opposition parties exist to clarify choices for voters, to sharpen alternatives and to force governing parties to negotiate reform on substantive terms. A robust opposition can support government initiatives on a case-by-case basis while extracting meaningful policy shifts as the price of cooperation. What it cannot do, without hollowing itself out, is become a junior partner to continuity dressed up as consensus.
Muted dissent
South African politics is poorer for the absence of such a robust opposition, whatever its hue. The DA could have provided a model in which it lent conditional support to governance while maintaining a clear ideological and policy distance. Instead, the current arrangement risks normalising a politics of muted dissent, where coalition participation substitutes for genuine influence.
As the country approaches another electoral cycle the DA faces a defining question: does it seek accommodation within government, or influence over policy and direction? The two are not the same. Without clarity on this question the DA risks emerging from the GNU neither transformed nor transformative, merely absorbed.
• Cachalia, a businessman and management consultant, is a former DA MP and shadow public enterprises minister, and chaired De Beers Namibia.
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