The question of whether the DA has drifted right or slipped left over the past decade is increasingly beside the point, since it assumes that South African politics can still be meaningfully understood through a left–right ideological axis.
It also assumes that ideological movement is itself an important measure of political success or failure. Both assumptions are becoming harder to defend.
South Africans don’t wake up wondering whether their municipality is centre-left or centre-right. They wake up wanting it to work. They want a country with safe communities, functioning services, jobs and a government that treats them with dignity. That’s why the DA’s real contest is not over labels, but over whether decline is preventable and failure reversible.
Outcomes eclipse ideology
The more serious question is therefore not where the DA sits on a spectrum inherited from 20th-century European politics, but whether it improves the lives of people in the places where it governs, using the mechanisms actually available to it. On that question, ideology explains very little and outcomes explain far more.
Ideology remains a useful shorthand for clustering ideas. It is far less useful as a way of describing real people, real communities or real political choices under constraint. Most voters, and most governing decisions, do not emerge from ideological purity but from necessity, context and trade-offs.
Many commentators intuit much of this by noting the temporal and cultural contingencies shaping political language at a particular time. That intuition should lead to a deeper conclusion that if politics is context-bound, then static labels such as “left” and “right” lose most of their explanatory power.
In contemporary South Africa the decisive faultline is not between centre-left and centre-right. It is between those committed to preserving a failing status quo and its elites, the ANC’s elite-enrichment policy framework, often echoed by its ideological fellow travellers in the EFF and MK; and those seeking workable change within a collapsing state and offering competence as a contrast to widespread failure.
A more accurate divide is therefore between builders and breakers. Builders focus on institutions, systems and delivery. Keeping water flowing, electricity on, streets lit, permits issued, schools functioning and public money accounted for. Builders don’t pretend our problems are simple but they do treat them as solvable. They run toward what’s broken, roll up their sleeves and get busy fixing.
Breakers focus on symbolism, grievance, permanent mobilisation and rhetorical purity, even when the institutions under their care are visibly decaying, even collapsing.
In contemporary South Africa the decisive faultline is not between centre-left and centre-right. It is between those committed to preserving a failing status quo and its elites, the ANC’s elite-enrichment policy framework, often echoed by its ideological fellow travellers in the EFF and MK; and those seeking workable change within a collapsing state and offering competence as a contrast to widespread failure.
Seen through this lens the DA is not best understood as a party that has “moved right”, but as a party that has increasingly foregrounded construction over contestation.
A stronger DA will build a stronger South Africa. The DA is a party that governs well for everyone, reaches beyond its traditional comfort zones and treats time in government as valuable only to the extent that it delivers real impact. It means leading with belief in the country and restoring hope through the hard, practical work of making institutions function and communities safer, one measurable improvement at a time.
If the real divide is between builders and breakers, the only honest way to judge it is by looking at outcomes where power is actually exercised. South Africa gives parties responsibility across three spheres of government (local, provincial and national) and in each sphere the DA has had the opportunity, to different degrees and under different constraints, to turn its approach into measurable results.
At local government level, where ideology is least useful and delivery most visible, DA-run municipalities consistently outperform their peers. They account for a disproportionate share of South Africa’s clean audits, higher capital expenditure on infrastructure and better maintenance of existing assets.
Most strikingly, unemployment rates and poverty rates in DA-governed metros and municipalities are consistently lower than national and provincial averages, and dropping further. This is not because local government controls macro-economic levers that can muscularly affect unemployment, but because functional administration, planning certainty and service reliability create conditions in which private enterprise, investment and growth are possible.
At provincial level the Western Cape remains a statistical outlier by almost every measurable metric: education outcomes, healthcare performance, financial management, infrastructure delivery and economic participation. It has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, the best in quality school passes, the strongest primary healthcare indicators and the most consistently clean audits. These outcomes have persisted across leadership changes, suggesting institutional depth rather than personality-driven success.
Whatever ideological label one applies it is difficult to argue that these results are accidental.
Most strikingly, unemployment rates and poverty rates in DA-governed metros and municipalities are consistently lower than national and provincial averages, and dropping further.
At national level the DA should only be in government to the extent that we are making an impact. The test of participation is whether ordinary South Africans can feel the state working a little better than it did before in the areas where the DA has responsibility: in the queues they no longer have to stand in, in the services that start to function again, in the small but real signs that decline is not inevitable and is steadily being reversed.
The DA’s work in the government of national unity (GNU) will not always be headline-grabbing ideological victories and they won’t always satisfy those who treat politics as theatre. Some of that is of course desirable to demonstrate that the direction of the state is being slowly bent to reflect our values, because we know ours are the only values that will make South Africa work.
The 2026 national budget is perhaps the single greatest reflection of the DA’s values in action and represents a profound values victory. It is a budget that gives considerable new support for enterprise, small business and a growing economy. So too in mother tongue education, fighting expropriation, and more.
But beyond these landmark wins most victories have thus far been of the often-quiet and more practical sort. What matters in a coalition is impact — the daily, solutions focused, measurable work of state repair that rarely fits neatly into left-right narratives, yet ultimately determines whether a state functions at all.
A strong DA in the GNU is not there to provide cover for failure, nor to be absorbed into business-as-usual. We are there to insist on higher standards, to shape the direction of the government where we can and to draw a clear line when the price of participation becomes the normalisation of dysfunction.
That is what it means to be strong in government. Not maximal confrontation and not comfortable cohabitation, but disciplined, principled delivery because South Africans deserve a government that works.
The question, then, is not whether the DA sounds less like the party it was in 2014. Of course it does. South Africa in 2026 is not South Africa in 2014.
The real question is whether a politics oriented toward building institutions, capacity, infrastructure and trust offers a more plausible path out of decline than one oriented toward perpetual explanation, moral signalling and managed failure.
On that question, ideological cartography tells us very little. Performance tells us a great deal.
• Hill-Lewis is mayor of Cape Town and a candidate for the DA leadership.
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