PETER BRUCE | DA’s big task is to grow votes but stay liberal  

By the time the second-largest political party in South Africa, the DA, closes its congress in Johannesburg this afternoon, the mayor of Cape Town, Geordin Hill-Lewis, will be its leader. He is just 39 years old, and around him will gather one of the youngest and most racially diverse leadership teams in our modern politics.

It’s a big moment as the two people who have most actively shaped the DA since 2019 — John Steenhuisen as party leader and Helen Zille as chair of its federal executive — leave office. Zille will become mayor of Johannesburg as probably the final act in her long political career. Steenhuisen’s future is unclear.

When he announced a few months ago that he wouldn’t stand for re-election as leader (after insisting all of 2025 that he would), Steenhuisen said he wanted to focus on his job as agriculture minister and fight the ravages of foot and mouth disease. But his handling of the epidemic has been so unpopular with farmers and damaging to the party — even senior centrist figures have called for his removal — that Hill-Lewis might need to ask President Cyril Ramaphosa to fire him.

Between them, Zille and Steenhuisen ripped the party away from its hesitant and often chaotic dalliance with racial redress begun under Zille’s leadership, dropping all reference to race in its statements and policies. The move was designed to shore up its support among conservative white voters, but it did little to strengthen the DA.

In 2024 its share of the vote rose only marginally, and the party has struggled to craft economic and social policy fit for an overwhelmingly black electorate still alive to the injuries, effortlessly preserved for it by the ANC, of apartheid and colonialism. And where Zille would once take comfort in coloured voters turning to the DA when threatened by the movement of black voters into the Western Cape, the Patriotic Alliance is now chomping away at that old certainty.

Hill-Lewis has to find a way to get those black votes while remaining true to DA liberal principles

So Hill-Lewis and his new team have a gigantic challenge: how to sharply grow the DA vote while remaining a liberal party passionate about open markets, individual enterprise and property rights. And they don’t have much time. Local government elections later this year or in early 2027 will test the DA’s ability to make headway in broken municipalities, big and small, as the ANC and smaller fragmenting parties around it fight to keep it out of power.

As leader, Hill-Lewis has four personal challenges:

• He must find a way to relax the extreme, almost absurd, levels of bureaucracy in the party. MPs and members should be much more free to express themselves.
• He must ensure that a clear DA national identity is formed through policies that do not merely amend or oppose ANC policies.
• He must, if he is to remain mayor of Cape Town while party leader, appoint a strong and trusted deputy leader (a new position that he may simply have to create by command) as its senior in the government of national unity.
• Most importantly, he must understand, since he insists on remaining mayor, that the country needs him to be a national leader too: a statesman. His life must dramatically change. From today, the cuddly nice guy needs to show much more steel. He must stand and fight the corruption, the rotten policy and the political cowardice of the ruling party without pause or care.

If he is also going to fight for a bigger place in the next coalition government, he has no option but to find more votes. The new leadership team will help, but the DA won just 21.8% of the vote in 2024. The collapse (caused by Jacob Zuma) in the ANC vote won the DA only a relatively minor role in national government.

That can’t happen in 2029, and don’t expect the ANC to totally collapse. The election, however unlikely it may seem now, of someone like Patrice Motsepe to lead the ANC at the end of next year would make the DA’s task much more difficult. Hill-Lewis needs the DA vote north of 30% to secure a robust share in the next government on his own, or he needs, now, to begin building sustainable political alliances that get him there.

Those new votes are going to have to be black, and no matter how well Zille may do in Johannesburg, you cannot extrapolate for the rest of the country. Zille is by now unique. Hill-Lewis on his own has to find a way to get those black votes while remaining true to DA liberal principles.

It’s a sad commentary on our country that if he were black, no-one would notice he was a liberal, and the DA vote would climb exponentially. Perhaps nowhere more so than among white voters who long for black leaders they feel safe with.

That’s another challenge for Hill-Lewis as he takes the reins today. But it may be a conversation for another time.