Maimane is the DA's future. Zille is its past

11 June 2017 - 02:00 By peter bruce

British Prime Minister Theresa May appears to have made a disastrous decision in calling Thursday's election to seek a new mandate for the UK's Brexit negotiations. Fundamentally, she lost, failing to win the outright majority pundits had forecast.Electorates are fickle, ours included. And while it is natural now to focus on December's ANC leadership contest, the electorate is not involved in that. The vote that matters is the general election in 2019.How is it shaping up?Currently, the best polling in South Africa is done by the DA. When I last heard, about a month ago, it had the ANC winning between 48% and 51% in 2019. The EFF moves above 10% but not by much. The DA gets past the 30% mark.Assume ANC at 48%, DA at 32% and EFF at 12%. That's (potentially) 48% versus 44% and who governs depends on who wins over the minnows. It is, at the moment, really close.Of course, it's also complicated. If the ANC elects Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as its president in December it may do worse than 48%. However, if Jacob Zuma quits as South Africa's president soon after his former wife is elected party leader, thus making her the country's president as well, she may do better.Similarly, if the DA does not contain the open warfare between its leader, Mmusi Maimane, and former leader Helen Zille, it risks actually losing votes rather than progressing.And the EFF continues to struggle. Its leader, Julius Malema, although hugely entertaining, is all over the place. If he weakens Maimane by putting him under pressure to fire Zille as Western Cape premier he loses a significant meal ticket.Malema has threatened to withdraw the EFF support that keeps DA mayors in office in Johannesburg and Pretoria if Maimane doesn't fire Zille. If he does that he sacrifices the ability to influence policy and contracts in both metropoles.If Malema thinks he has votes to gain by toppling Maimane, he is wrong. Very few of the middle-class black voters Maimane is chasing will be choosing between the EFF and the DA. A weakened Maimane benefits the ANC.This is the tragedy of Zille and her supporters. Liberal intellectuals like James Myburgh and Gwen Ngwenya, chief operating officer of the South African Institute of Race Relations, have begun to fight for her in what many mistakenly see as a battle for the soul of the DA — traditional liberals pitted against what we might call social democrats led by Maimane.The liberals cast themselves as tellers of the truth: that by stating that not everything about colonialism's legacy is bad, as Zille insists, they are simply facing facts, and that by arguing that Zille's reluctance to resign as premier is hurting Maimane's and the DA's 2019 prospects, his supporters are sacrificing principle for expediency.I don't see it that way. Zille, not the party or Maimane, is making me choose between a viable alternative to the ANC — one with a liberal heart and a social conscience — or just an effective opposition. For there is no way the DA without Maimane can progress in 2019. He is the party's future. She is its past.That's because he is not Zille. He will, if he has the sense I think he has, place economic policy at the heart of the 2019 campaign, something Zille has never done. She isn't interested in crafting a new and more inclusive economy. She isn't interested in economic policy at all. He is. And if he chooses to endorse restorative measures like affirmative action, as he surely must, most thinking South Africans would surely understand.The "true liberals" in the DA would hate it, though. It offends against principle, they argue. Not true. The principle inherent in an efficient and inclusive market economy (such as Germany's, for example) is, in our unique circumstance, the very opposite of expediency.South African liberalism has never embraced economic policy as core to its principles. That is why it doesn't grow. "Opportunity" — the furthest Zille ever went with an economic idea — is absurd in a society as unequal as ours. A more social-democratic DA would be a much more comfortable home for liberals than, as is evident, a liberal DA is for social democrats. Imagine being able to appoint a liberal education minister, a liberal foreign minister ...That's only imaginable if Maimane survives and Zille goes gracefully...

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