I should be more careful. But when an X account tweeted a mocked-up DA poster featuring Rob Hersov as a leadership candidate this week, I stuck my tongue in my cheek and replied, “It may actually not be a bad idea.” Friends called to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind.
I have form in the local world of political endorsement, but no, I don’t want Hersov to run the DA. But then again, I don’t really want John Steenhuisen to run it either, though he seems to be the only person to have put up his hand thus far.
I’m going to try not to get involved in the DA election save to say this: it would be just breathtaking if a party that insists it can challenge the ANC for leadership of this great country were to re-elect, uncontested, Steenhuisen as leader. I don’t think he has the qualities required to deliver the direction the DA needs.
The DA got into government because Jacob Zuma decimated the ANC, and Ramaphosa was brave enough to form a coalition without him
Obviously there are other views. Frans Cronje recently warned on his new channel, The Common Sense, that the DA “should be very careful about removing John. Since he became leader of his party, its support went up, not down, and it’s polling as strongly as it ever has. His party is vying for control of Gauteng … and to win South Africa’s biggest cities — it already has Cape Town [but] Johannesburg and Pretoria can be won. This is not a minor achievement.
“His chief rival, the ANC, lost its control of the country under his watch. He got his party into the government … since he’s been in the government, essentially co-leading the country with Mr [Cyril] Ramaphosa, things have got a little bit better.”
That’s a stretch. The DA got into government because Ramaphosa’s predecessor, Jacob Zuma, decimated the ANC, and Ramaphosa was brave enough to form a coalition without him.
Steenhuisen saw only a marginal increase in the DA’s proportion of the vote in 2024. And if the DA wins Johannesburg in local elections this year it’ll be because its candidate is Helen Zille — and she nominated herself. She’s likely to win handsomely, but while recent polling may show the DA up at around 30% or more of the national vote, it never does as well on the day as early polls suggest.
I’m not a DA member, but if I were I’d nominate Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis in April. He’s politically mature and has a good rapport with people, though we still know too little about his view of the world. He has said he doesn’t want to run against Steenhuisen, but reports insist that DA funders want him too, and that matters.
As leader, Steenhuisen is relentlessly upbeat about the DA’s prospects. That’s to be expected, but polls are not facts. With the ANC so weak and ineffective, failure to make a decisive break upwards in local elections this year could do real damage to the DA’s ability ever to establish itself as a serious national political force in the years ahead.
By the 2029 national elections, Ramaphosa will be gone, and without him there and an ageing Zuma in decline, the likelihood is that the rump of Zuma’s MK Party will simply reattach itself to the ANC and isolate the DA.
In the 2019 national elections, then DA leader Mmusi Maimane won 20.77% of the vote. In 2024 Steenhuisen managed just 21.8%, pretty average given the state of the country. And it’s excruciating now to watch the DA — in the face of bitter by-election headwinds from left and right — claiming to be polling 30% as the same polls pull the ANC below 40%.
Those numbers just aren’t going to happen unless the DA is able to do two things. It has to take consistent and compelling control of national debate about the economy, which features only sporadically in DA politics. The economy is really all that matters.
Second, given that it may have maxed out its white and possibly even coloured vote, it has to grow wildly among black voters to get anything north of 25% in 2029 or to beat the 26.8% it won in the local elections of 2016.
To grow the DA meaningfully among black voters without losing its white and coloured base is going to require extraordinary leadership, but with the right captaincy and messaging it may be possible. The ANC has lost its way, and the country is adrift.
Placing the burden for fixing all this on Hill-Lewis’s young shoulders may be a big ask, but I don’t think there’s a choice. He simply must stand. Even with a change in leadership, the DA could remain in the government of national unity and Steenhuisen could stay in the cabinet.
But the DA is divided and disoriented while he is its head.
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