“If people don’t like the truth, that’s not our problem. We cannot tailor our message to woke sensibilities.“
Democratic Alliance (DA) federal chairperson Helen Zille says party leader John Steenhuisen will be the president of South Africa should theMulti-Party Charter for South Africa secure a 50% plus one majority in the 29 May national and provincial elections.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian this week Zille, whose influence extends far beyond the party machine she runs, dismissed criticism of Steenhuisen’s leadership and the party’s confrontational campaign.
Partners, including the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), have argued that the charter, also called the moonshot coalition, required a black presidential candidate to achieve broader appeal, but Zille insisted that Steenhuisen would take on this job.
With a week to go until voting day, Zille said that should the DA and its coalition partners secure the 50% plus one needed to govern the country, “yes, that means John becomes president”.
She said the criticism of Steenhuisen was the construct of a hostile media that was “shooting themselves in the foot” with “all this anti-DA propaganda”.
“The media is never fair, especially not to the DA. We are completely used to that. I mean, it’s water off our backs,” Zille said. “We just ignore them and let them get on with what they want to do.”
Steenhuisen kicked off his second term as DA leader in April last year with a commitment to dislodge the ANC from power through the moonshot pact with the IFP and other parties. The project has gained traction and the support of eight smaller parties, but recent polls show that it may still fail to secure a majority in the face of the ANC’s clawing back public support going into the elections.
The latest tracking poll by the Social Research Foundation sets ANC support at 45%, the DA at 23% and the IFP at 5% in a 66% turnout — numbers that do not add up to 50% plus one for the charter.
The DA and the IFP are understood to have been quietly talking to the ANC — some of whose leaders are also speaking of the possibility of a national dialogue or a government of national unity — while remaining publicly committed to the moonshot project.
Zille said she was aware that the IFP and the ANC had been in tentative talks about potential post-poll cooperation.
“We are all running individual election campaigns but there is still a very strong commitment if the DA and the IFP can put together a coalition — let’s say in KwaZulu-Natal or Gauteng — that we will do that,” she said.
“That would be our first option. The IFP is clearly looking at other options down the line, if the first best scenario isn’t an option.”
The charter’s leaders last met on 9 May, after the last of the joint press briefings on election issues that they had held on a weekly basis. A source familiar with the process, who asked not to be named, said the moonshot pact was effectively over and that the parties were now only “going through the motions”.
The source said there was a danger of the charter being turned into a “collective bargaining instrument” which could see its “political betrayal” by parties motivating for their participation in an ANC-led government.
Zille said the DA was not “delusional” and did not believe it could secure an overall majority, but was committed to the coalition and its aim of a collective majority.
“If that doesn’t eventuate you’ve got to analyse all the options and take the least bad option. It might be a very bad option, but it’s going to be the least bad of circumstances,” she said. This might include participating in a “grand coalition” with the ANC.
Zille said a coalition between the ANC, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), the uMkhonto weSizwe party and the Patriotic Alliance — which was what its recent controversial burning flag advert was meant to symbolise — would be “the worst worst option”.
It was an “anomaly that the ANC has been over 50% for 30 years. Now they’re going to drop under 50% and they’ll never get over it again.”
She added that getting more than 20% in a proportional representation system like South Africa’s was “big” and that the DA’s objective was to be the largest party in the coalitions running the country.
“People don’t get that the aim should not be to get over 50%. Coalitions are the name of the game. But if we have a system where tiny one-person parties can hold the balance of power, those coalitions are never going to be stable,” she said.
Zille, who served two terms as DA federal leader, said media houses consistently failed to read the political room when it came to the party.
“The only times that we’ve done really badly is when the media supported us,” Zille said. “I have no doubt. The media supported our 2019 campaign and the voters hated it. The media hated our 1999 campaign and the voters loved it.”
The exit of former DA leader Mmusi Maimane after the 2019 elections — in which it lost about 600 000 votes — has seen an exodus of black leaders, but Zille defended the party, saying it was not racist.
Maimane and others had subscribed to “critical race theory” and had “started defaulting to race as the primary mover of every issue”, which had resulted in “disaster”.
The party’s response to Maimane “wasn’t a kickback by conservatives. It was a drawing of the line by genuine non-racial liberals”, Zille added.
“The people that we saw as being retrogressive were people who were adopting an apartheid philosophy,” she said.
Zille said far more black people had joined the DA, which had 452 African public representatives, than had left it in the wake of the 2019 resignations of Maimane, Herman Mashaba and others.
She was unapologetic about the tone of the party’s campaign and its messaging, no matter who this offended.
“We tell the truth. We are now in an era that comes with the wokeness of everybody taking offence to the truth and everyone feeling offended when anything is said that they are uncomfortable with,” Zille said.
The flag-burning advert had “offended a lot of people but we got the message across and we will be right”, Zille said. “If people don’t like the truth, that’s not our problem. We cannot tailor our message to woke sensibilities.”
Asked whether Steenhuisen would face the same review process as Maimane did, should the DA lose further support, Zille said there would be “accountability”.
“The DA is a party of accountability. The DA has internal structures that analyse everything — every by-election. We analyse it on the basis of data and evidence and then there is a conclusion,” Zille said.
“That same process will be gone through as it always is in the Democratic Alliance. We will do it on the basis of evidence and take it from there.”
She said the party had been aware that there might be a backlash over its campaign television advert depicting a burning South African flag, which public broadcaster SABC has refused to air in its current form.
She described the advert as “very successful”, saying it had been vetted by the federal executive election oversight committee.
The DA campaign was aimed at its existing voters and those who might possibly vote for it.
“That’s the target market we have. We do a huge amount of research into that market and we know that other people aren’t going to vote for us,” Zille said.
“So our job is to not appease people who aren’t going to vote for us. Our job is to make a very strong case to people who have the potential to vote for us,’ she said.
Zille believes her return to active politics in 2019 after a short stint with the Institute for Race Relations has assisted in building the party after its loss of support at the polls.
“The state of the party is good. We call it the blue machine for a reason. Everybody is a moving part. Everybody knows their role and everyone does it.”
She said the party’s performance management systems and merit-based appointments meant that “the machine works very well”.
The DA had a branch in every ward it held — and wanted one in every ward — but was wary of mass recruitment for its own sake because this would result in internal fractional battles.
“We don’t measure our success by the number of members … We measure our success by the outcome of votes. That is the most important thing,” she said.
The DA worked with 25 to 35 member branches made up of “people who are really dedicated, committed, who will work in the elections” rather than structures made up of 500 “paper members”.
The party had become “truly diverse”, with a three-way split between black, brown and white voters, and had more diverse candidate lists than the ANC, the EFF or the Patriotic Alliance, she said.
Zille believes that the party is a “much better place than we were five years ago”.
“It’s certainly working. Obviously, there’s always room for improvement and we never stand still. It’s a process of continuous improvement,” she said.