INSIGHT | DA in a cul-de-sac of its own making

A serious critique of the DA’s current leadership configuration must begin with a structural observation rather than a rhetorical one.

The recent party’s leadership slate reflects neither the demographic composition of SA nor the sociological profile of the voters it must win to grow.

The gender imbalance in senior decision-making roles is not an incidental flaw but a diagnostic signal of deeper institutional conservatism in candidate selection, patronage networks, and its racialised consolidation of internal power.

It is the symptom of a party that has confused stability with stasis.

The DA has long positioned itself as SA’s pre-eminent liberal alternative, rhetorically committed to constitutionalism, equal opportunity, and the rule of law.

Yet its leadership composition reveals a persistent disjuncture between normative commitment and organisational practice.

Gender parity is not merely a representational good but a strategic imperative.

Parties that fail to incorporate women meaningfully into leadership tend to reproduce narrow policy priorities and exhibit structurally diminished responsiveness to a diverse electorate.

The optics are particularly damaging because they hollow out the DA’s most cherished self-description.

A party that rejects race-based redress on principled constitutional grounds must, at minimum, demonstrate excellence in other registers of inclusion.

The universalist language remains; the universalist practice has not followed.

Helen Zille’s claim that the party rescued itself from “ethnonationalist wokeism” by parting ways with figures such as Mmusi Maimane is rhetorically effective but analytically thin and ultimately evasive.

It reframes what was, in substance, a leadership crisis and an identity reckoning into a civilisational struggle over ideological purity.

The term “wokeism,” deployed in this context, functions as a political frequency that resonates with a segment of the electorate made anxious by redistributive discourse and racial transformation.

The irony is transparent.

The charge of identity politics, levelled against those who sought a more racially inclusive leadership, was itself an act of identity politics, just in the opposite direction, and less willing to name itself.

This framing, however, obscures a more consequential strategic choice, which is the DA’s deliberate pivot away from a multiracial, aspirationally inclusive coalition toward a whiter politics defensive posture.

John Steenhuisen says it is a bittersweet moment as he hands over the reins of the DA. “This is the first time I am not on the ballot, but at least I am leaving an intact organisation.” He added that the DA federal congress this weekend would usher in a generational change of leadership. “That is very significant. Most of the DA’s incoming leadership are in their early 40s; they can form a bridge between the party and the electorate.” Steenhuisen appears to have been shown the door as the leader of the DA amid allegations of personal financial mismanagement and the alleged rise of factions in the DA. “I say it is better to lead the whole party instead of just a faction.” He said he hoped the congress would give clear direction on the party’s mandate in the government of national unity.

Under Maimane, the party undertook a genuine — if imperfect — experiment in expanding its appeal among black middle-class voters, particularly in the urban and peri-urban constituencies where SA’s next political settlements are likely to be forged.

His departure, and the departures that accompanied and followed it — Lindiwe Mazibuko most conspicuously among them — marked a retraction of that experiment.

It was not merely a change in leadership style but a contraction of political imagination.

This matters because that experiment represented, in all probability, the DA’s last realistic window of opportunity to become a party with genuine national governing ambitions.

SA carries, in suspension, a significant political constituency: educated, aspirationaly mobile, disillusioned with the ANC’s failures, and politically unattached.

The DA was better positioned than any other party to harvest this constituency.

Instead, it chose to fire the very figures who embodied the possibility of that harvest, and in doing so communicated, unmistakably, that black leadership within the DA remains conditionally acceptable only insofar as it ratifies, rather than challenges, the assumptions of a white liberal institutional culture.

The strategic logic of this retrenchment is not difficult to trace.

The rise of the FF+ among disaffected Afrikaner voters created a palpable electoral threat to the DA’s traditional base.

As a short-term tactic, this has a certain electoral rationale. But as a long-term strategy it is self-defeating.

By adopting rhetorical registers and policy tones calibrated to reassure the white conservative constituency, the DA risks ideological convergence with the very party it seeks to outcompete.

In political economy terms, this is a race to the bottom within a numerically finite and demographically contracting voter segment.

SA’s white electorate constitutes a numerical ceiling — and not a high one.

Even under optimal conditions, it cannot deliver national power, or anything approaching it.

The DA’s earlier growth trajectory, most pronounced between 2014 and 2019, was predicated on consolidating this base additionally to the hoped for incremental gains among black voters, specifically, the emerging middle class.

These black middle class are sensitively not ideologically aligned with racial conservatism.

That is the growth frontier the DA has lost by retreating from authentic multiculturalism.

Outgoing DA Federal Council chairperson Helen Zille says South African is on a different political trajectory because of the blue party. Zille was delivering her last official address as chair at the party’s Federal Congress at Gallagher Estate in Midrand on Saturday. “Historians will one day ask this question: ‘how did South Africa, of all countries, chart a different course?’ And the answer will be this — the Democratic Alliance, you,” said Zille to loud applause from more than 2,000 delegates. “We have taken on two powerful racial nationalist traditions in our history. We defeated one of them at the end of the 20th century. We have prevented another from dominating our new landscape, acting as a powerful break in the trend in liberated countries for the liberators to become the oppressors. We have built one of the largest, proudest and most resilient liberal movements in the world and we did it in one of the most hostile environments imaginable to liberal politics. “And we have done this in an era when much of the world is beating an alarming retreat from liberal principles and the moderate, rules-based order itself, is under threat. There is no shortage of parties in our country that want to pull us in that same direction.” Zille, who is stepping down as Federal Council chairperson to focus on her campaign to become the next mayor of Johannesburg, told party delegates that the local government elections due to take place later this year will be hotly contested. She said she expected “hundreds of parties” to be on the ballot paper. “Many will seek to weaponise our diversity and to divide South Africans along racial lines. We reject that path. We are the party of inclusion, not division. We call ourselves the blue people. Not black, not white, not brown, but blue. Blue people distinguish themselves by their shared values.” Zille added that the 26-year-old party has grown to be one of the biggest liberal movements in the world. “We have built one of the largest, proudest and most resilient liberal movements in the world and we did it in one of the most hostile environments imaginable to liberal politics. “And now we are on course to become the largest party in South Africa’s metros at the end this year. And from there, we move to the next milestone, becoming South Africa’s biggest party…woza 2029 woza,” said Zille in reference to the next national elections due to take place in 2029.

The DA’s oscillation between liberal universalism and defensive identity politics has begun to erode the ideological coherence that was, for much of its history, its most distinctive asset.

The deeper irony is that in seeking to avoid what Zille characterises as “ethnonationalist wokeism,” the DA has drifted into its own form of identity politics — less explicitly articulated, but carrying the same structural logic of minority consolidation over majority engagement.

It is not white nationalism in any formal doctrinal sense. But it operates, strategically, within the logic of minority entrenchment of shoring up a bounded constituency rather than building the cross-racial, cross-class solidarity that national electoral viability requires.

What the DA currently resembles, in political terms, is a party in a cul-de-sac of its own making — a strategy that yields short-term stabilisation at the cost of long-term foreclosure.

If the DA is to recover its earlier growth trajectory it will need to revisit the experiment it abandoned of the construction of a genuinely broad, inclusive coalition that reflects SA as it is, in its complexity and its possibility, rather than as its most anxious constituency fears it might become.

It will also need to treat black voters as fodder for ‘white’ leadership.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a Komani-born writer