DA leader John Steenhuisen. Photo: (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Ahead of the 2019 national and provincial elections, the Democratic Alliance embarked on a change of strategy to try to sell the party to black voters as a viable non-racial alternative to the governing ANC.
The strategy failed to bring on board black voters and alienated some existing white voters, culminating in Mmusi Maimane stepping down as the DA’s first black leader and leaving the party after a disastrous showing at the ballot in 2019.
With its current leader John Steenhuisen — most likely — at the helm, the DA looks set to default to its original setting for the 2024 elections, playing it safe to retain its traditional support base while trying to dislodge the ruling ANC and emerge as the leader of a national coalition.
The merger with Patricia De Lille’s Independent Democrats in 2010, the election of Lindiwe Mazibuko as party leader in 2011 and the appointment of former Black Consciousness activist Mamphela Ramphele as co-leader with Helen Zille in 2014 had all been aimed at creating a breakthrough moment with black voters.
The DA took 22.2% of the vote in the national and provincial elections in 2014, and following the election of Maimane as leader in May 2015, improved on its showing, ousting the ANC in Johannesburg and securing 26.3% of the vote nationwide in the 2016 local government election.
Maimane — and DA leaders aligned with him — believed that the only way the party could grow beyond its role as the official opposition was to present itself as a viable, non-racial alternative to the ANC.
Cognisant of the fact that the party had reached its ceiling with its historical white support, they roped in centre-right international pollsters and political strategists — including an American linked to the Democratic Party, Stan Greenberg — to develop a strategy to convince black voters that the party had broken with this historical voter base through the election of a black leader.
Central to the strategy was the muting of DA leaders like Steenhuisen, then chief whip, former leader Zille and federal council chairperson James Selfe to counter the perception among black people that Maimane was a puppet of Zille and other whites running the party.
It also hinged on Maimane publicly censuring Zille — whose defence of colonialism on social media undermined the DA’s attempts to ditch its white image — and the party engaging on issues of racism while halting media statements about farm attacks.
The strategy was contained in a so-called “white paper” circulated by DA leadership, which was the subject of several of the seven investigations initiated by the party after 2019.
The DA appointed a federal head office war room, which coordinated media communication ahead of the 2019 elections, providing the party’s provinces with issues to take up and drive — including the disastrous intervention at Schweizer-Reneke — on social and traditional media.
The plan bombed, not only failing to lure in black voters but also pushing away some of the DA’s white support base, with the party’s share of the vote dropping to 20.7%. Maimane, who was blamed for the loss of support during several DA postmortems, resigned in October 2019.
One of the postmortems, conducted by the DA’s federal legal commission in 2021, said the goal of the strategy was to “emancipate” the DA of an alleged perception of being a white party and in so doing attract support of black voters. Instead, it “broke down trust with many white voters” with members believing that “the DA had become another party deviating from its core principles due to the American directive”.
“The ultimate result was the loss of support and members who subscribed to the values and principles of the party and who felt betrayed by the different and almost reckless alternative direction within which the party was steered by the relevant individuals within the party,” the report said.
According to the report, the party has had the ability to “self correct and re-correct in the right direction”.
“In the past almost two years the DA has done a lot of introspection and the authors of this report would like to believe that we are on the right track and honour our core values and principles once again,” the report said.
In practical terms, this translated into the election of Steenhuisen as leader in 2019 — a post he has declared his intention to retain in April when he will stand for a second term — and a return to a more aggressive stance on minority issues.
Zille has also returned to the centre of the party, taking the post of federal chairperson in October 2019 after her return from the political fringe she had occupied during Maimane’s tenure.
A number of high-profile black leaders have since left the DA, among them former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba, who launched ActionSA in August 2000 and has proved to be a thorn in the flesh of his former colleagues.
The DA’s tone going into the 2021 local government election was very different to that of 2016 or 2019, with it once more competing with the Freedom Front Plus for the votes it lost to that party in the previous poll.
Its controversial “the ANC called you murderers, the DA calls you heroes” posters in the Phoenix area, where more than 30 people were killed during the June 2021 riots, are perhaps the most stark evidence of the philosophical step to the right.
The 21.62% the DA secured in 2021 was a slight improvement on 2019, but a 5.28% drop from 2016, with the party failing to claw back the ground it had lost.
The leadership election in April — and the 2024 national and provincial elections — present the DA with similar challenges it faced in 2015 and 2019.
Will the party again try to go beyond its traditional power base to try to attract new, black voters or continue in the default mode it returned to after 2019?
Former Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse has indicated that she intends to stand for leader and address the “trust deficit” between the party under Steenhuisen and the majority of voters, but she is unlikely to be successful.
The party is more likely to stick with Steenhuisen and continue on its current trajectory as a 20% party, challenging the ANC for power at the head of a “blue coalition” as envisaged by the leader recently.
Zille’s analysis of what happened in the DA — and where it is going — is brutal.
“Stan Greenberg (the American pollster advising the party up until 2019) tried to turn the DA ‘woke’ based on race essentialism and the politics of racial division. That approach is the terrain of the ANC and EFF (Economic Freedom Fighters), not the DA,” Zille said last week.
“Unsurprisingly, it was disastrous for us. We lost votes across the board, in every community. The report of the review committee was adopted, the DA found its roots again and we self corrected. We are on a growth path again,” she said.
This is part 3 of a 3-part story
Read part 1 – The USA, Maimane and the DA: How Mmusi Maimane’s plan to change the DA fell apart
Read part 2 – Schweizer-Reneke saga comes back to bite DA leaders
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