Howard Barrell
Perhaps, more than anything else, force of personality and raw political will explain how Tony Leon grabbed the title of official leader of the opposition. For if any one individual and his image dominated the election campaign – more so perhaps than even Thabo Mbeki’s or Nelson Mandela’s – it was that of the pugnacious leader of the Democratic Party.
With at least 40 seats in the National Assembly, the DP has narrowly pipped the New National Party, at least 31, as the official opposition. This means an end to the exalted status in the National Assembly enjoyed over the past two years by the NNP leader, Marthinus van Schalkwyk – sweet, diffuse and massively ineffective.
Leon’s and the DP’s new pre-eminence among the African National Congress’s opponents means that the man who has long been known as the “real leader of the opposition” is now also the official leader of the opposition.
Mocked as a “chihuahua” by the ANC earlier this year because he had a mere six fellow MPs at his side in the National Assembly, Leon returns now as a bull terrier with at least 39. His larger tally of MPs and his new official position will give him more talking time in the assembly, and he will use it to give the ANC maximum hell.
Wednesday afternoons – when the assembly normally hears questions and interpolations – will be much, much more entertaining as a result. The “Thabo versus Tony Show” each Wednesday could well turn out to be a gladiatorial contest every bit as riveting as its British counterpart.
Forty-two-year-old Leon’s chutzpah and hard-driving leadership has wrought an important change on South Africa’s political landscape. Muscular liberalism has displaced its rather limp-wristed predecessor, and is positioning itself to provide the core of an alternative to the ANC.
This has offended some more delicate sensibilities in liberal circles. But it has transformed the DP from a party facing extinction in 1994 with just 1,7% of the vote into the second largest in the country.
Speak to DP members and they attribute this success overwhelmingly to Leon’s leadership – sharp, irascible, supremely demanding, somethimes offensive, but motivated always by a passionate desire to advance his cause.
It may be tasteless to say so, but the death in the course of the campaign of Zac de Beer, the awfully nave, awfully genteel man who led the DP to its nadir in 1994, symbolised the abrupt and dramatic transformation that has occurred in the DP.
Leon dismissed criticisms of the flavour of his election campaign – uncompromisingly, even bitterly combative. The “chattering classes” is his latest insult for his critics. He reserves particular contempt for those one-time or almost liberals who, in his view, lack the backbone for the battle that must be fought to keep South Africa democratic and to take it to modernity.
He sees their allegations that the DP pandered to racist impulses among whites during the campaign as little more than a disingenuous attempt by some of his critics to camouflage their own cowardice.
“I and the DP haven’t changed our principles at all,” he says.
His is still the party of Helen Suzman. But it is now also the party of Piet Retief of Oudtshoorn, once a supporter of the white supremacist Conservative Party, and many like him. That, for Leon, means the DP has spread its message and advanced its cause, not that it has retreated from principle.
Having come close to destroying the NNP and displacing it, certainly among the white electorate, for the DP the challenge is now to take on the ANC for black support. When I suggest this to Leon – like every other political commentator has been doing for the past six months – his exasperation is audible in the silence that first greets me.
Then he controls himself: “Of course, of course,” he says. The unsaid part of his sentence is something like: “You bloody fool – don’t you think I know that?”
There is a sense in which Leon – judge’s son, former private schoolboy, Wits University student leader, dyed-in-the-wool liberal – represents the same chutzpah that drove Suzman during the bleakest days of apartheid. Both are secular Jews from a culture which, perhaps more than any other over the past two millennia, has known the dehumanising effect of intolerance.
Both are also gifted individuals who punch way, way beyond their weight.