The Democratic Alliance (DA) is arguably the best placed among opposition parties to make the advance towards a meaningful black vote. But to do so, the party must change. Armed with a war kitty, experience and growing electoral support, Tony Leon is valiantly trying to break the political mould.
”I’ve got to keep the rock and get to the hard place,” the leader of the largest political opposition party says as we sit down for an interview at the five-star Park Hyatt hotel in Rosebank. Leon is in the throes of implementing a ”painstaking” strategy to recast the DA as a non-racial opposition party that will not alienate its traditional supporters.
”We’ve got to grow and there are quite a few impediments — tradition, history, culture, et cetera. But there are also some encouraging green shoots,” he says. ”The party can’t go on with a white face because it isn’t white in its composition. In the Western Cape, for example, if it wasn’t for the coloured vote, we wouldn’t be in power.”
According to Leon the party’s membership is 60% black. But its voter base — the litmus used to measure the party’s demographics — is 80% white.
”Where vacancies emerge in the party, we must fill those with people of colour. As a liberal democratic party we’re against racial quotas, but that doesn’t mean we’re against affirmative action,” he said.
Joe Seremane, deputy president of the DA, has been tasked with hand-rearing black talent in the party for future leadership positions, he says.
Using the results of the local government election on March 2, Leon and his lieutenants, led by party chief executive Ryan Coetzee, moved back to the drawing board to make the final tweaks to a growth strategy with an objective to push the party’s voter support to 20% and beyond.
The party generally teeters between controlling 10% to 15% of the vote — it increased its national percentage by 4%, from 12,3% in 2004 to 16,3% in 2006 — but by Leon’s own admission, many of the voters are ”fickle”.
While Leon is keen to keep the details of the growth strategy under wraps, at its heart is to win black support — if the DA is ever going to be a credible contender for government office, it cannot rely solely on minority white, Indian and coloured voters.
So Leon is investing in the future.
”The most important thing is for us to become present in the mind of the voters,” he said. ”The broad-strokes approach of rushing in with fanfare and then leaving doesn’t work. The ANC accuses us of being a white party — if you’re present in the community on an ongoing basis then that becomes propaganda, but if you only arrive for a couple of months every five years then the propaganda has more salience.”
He said his party strategists had developed a model that, while it wasn’t foolproof, ”was fairly close to the mark”, to gauge, ward by ward, the factors that had contributed to the party’s success and failure. ”You’ll appreciate that this is a very painstaking block-by-block approach.” Two specific areas the DA is using as ”success story” templates are the Albert Luthuli Municipality in Mpumulanga and certain areas in the uThukela Municipality in northern KwaZulu-Natal where the party significantly increased its black vote in the local election.
While the reasons for the party’s performance in specified areas would generally be geographically self-explanatory, the DA is the only opposition party that is trying to tackle the difficulties of cross-racial political unity in a divided society. But where he can, Leon is also pushing South Africa’s fragmented opposition to join forces.
”You can cooperate without surrendering your identity or submerging into some marriage of convenience,” he said. ”I think a powerful way, because it’s got permanent consequences, is what is going on in Cape Town. We put together a seven-party opposition coalition. The consequence of that is for the first time in the 12 years of democratic South Africa, the ANC has been voted out of a position it previously held. We are showing what can be done when we cooperate — that is what opposition voters’ want.”
He does not rule out the possibility of a Cabinet post for the DA, but says the circumstances for accepting would have to be exceptional.
”The party wouldn’t be completely against anything, but I can’t think that if our purpose is to create an alternative in South Africa, that getting into Cabinet would be the way of fulfilling that strategy,” said Leon. ”But there are situations where you can see it’s possible. For example, there is this much-vaunted split in the ANC — which is a bit like waiting for Godot — but if, out of it, the whole macro-economic structure of the country went up in smoke, our credit-worthiness was at risk et cetera, we would take the offer seriously. I’m giving you an extreme example, but it would have to be quite exceptional circumstances.”
Leon smiles embarrassedly when reference is made to Thabo Mbeki’s recent description of him in Parliament as ”a democrat to the bone”. ”I don’t know if he was being serious or sarcastic, but I’m as immune to flattery as I am to criticism,” he said. ”My job as leader of the opposition is to win the affection of voters, not of my opposition.”
As an afterthought he quips: ”But I think I have a better relationship with Mbeki than Zuma has with him, but my relationship with Mbeki is not as good as my relationship with Zuma, who I got to spend the Durban July handicap with. We got on like a house on fire, but I better not tell my voters that, they might scare! I’m serious!”