Most opposition leaders can enjoy the luxury of opposition: they can promise the world, free of the responsibility to deliver it.
The new leader of the DA, Helen Zille, is in an unusual position. Wisely, she has decided to remain mayor of Cape Town. She is betting that the opportunity to match words with deeds outweighs the risk that her term as mayor will expose her utterances for empty rhetoric.
But what exactly will she aim to achieve and for whom? To answer this question satisfactorily, Zille must confront a sharply drawn strategic choice that was, in the end, the unhinging of Tony Leon.
Leon never resolved the inherent tension between his pursuit of national power and the concomitant need to win votes from the majority community, and the fact that he persistently positioned his party as representative of minority communities.
It was unresolved because it is fundamentally unresolvable. You simply can’t do both. Zille must choose: is her DA to be a party of and for minorities, or will it be willing and able to persuade people from the African majority that it can provide a plausible political home for them?
The only possible way of untying the Gordian knot into which Leon tied the party with a series of strategic and tactical blunders, of which the infamous ‘fight back” campaign was the archetype, is to reclaim the lost ground of liberalism that Leon chose to sacrifice with his lurch to the right.
Combine this with a style that was as prickly as a scalded hedgehog, and an inability to convey any sense of empathy with the plight of the majority of his compatriots who are poor and often unemployed, and you had a package that failed to take advantage of a growing new electoral market of young, disenchanted voters who lack historical loyalties to the ANC.
To have any chance of success, Zille must reposition the party in three dimensions: strategy and tactics; style and tone; and policy and ideology. She should forget about winning national government — that is an Everest that will not be scaled by any current opposition party for the foreseeable future — and instead focus on winning key pockets of power at local government level to build up a credible record of governance.
Which takes us back to Cape Town, where Zille has the opportunity to show that she can develop and deliver policies for all Capetonians, not just the privileged minority that has been the focus of her party up until now.
Zille must lead the party from the Mayor’s office in Cape Town rather than the opposition front bench in the National Assembly. There has been a lot of nonsense on this subject from people who should know better, some of whom said that she should give up the mayorship because it would be ‘unthinkable” for the opposition not to have its leader in Parliament. Given the opportunity that real power in Cape Town presents, how foolish it would be to relinquish it just to be able to indulge in the increasingly feeble verbal jousting of the National Assembly.
Moreover, it is the one part of the country where the ANC is vulnerable; thanks to the consistently rotten performance of its provincial and local structures, Zille can shine in comparison.
She will, however, have a tough decision to make over the leadership of the DA in Parliament. Whoever it is must mirror Zille and not undermine her approach. She will need to execute radical surgery on the party’s senior management — the coterie of white men from privileged backgrounds who smothered Leon in the groupthink that was the fount of his most serious strategic misjudgements, and whose attitude to people with different views — even within their own party — is as illiberal as it was unwise.
It is an important moment in opposition politics. Zille has plenty of blind spots, including a tendency not to delegate enough and to try and do too much herself, but she is a quality politician — with integrity as well as talent.
As Zille now heads the one opposition party that has substantial resources, how she leads will have important implications for the county’s political future. If she proves to be as shrewd as she is undoubtedly energetic, she will not only grasp the various strategic, ideological and management nettles that together constitute her political inheritance, but also present the ANC with its own dilemma about how to handle her.
Focusing on a programme of social delivery that transcends race and class in Cape Town and wherever else the DA can gather government office; that is strong and principled on public ethics; and which espouses the liberal values of tolerance, accountability and constitutionalism, there is a chance to re-brand the opposition and encourage a broader coalition.