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When South Africa’s ruling party is as criminally inept as the ANC, opposition parties lick their lips.

Prior to the national elections earlier this year, the DA had seen consistent growth in terms of national votes.

It’s clear from the most recent set of results, however, that even as younger, urbanised black voters turn away from the ANC, the DA has something of an identity battle ahead.

Writing for the Daily Maverick, Stephen Grootes has succinctly distilled this battle, outlining how the DA has failed to capitalise on further ANC turmoil in recent months.

Whilst the Nkandla scandal saw persistent public attacks, with Mmusi Maimane being particularly outspoken in the media, the silence over the past few months is “deafening”

Here’s why:

The DA is still recovering from its poor performance in the May elections. The worst statistic for the party came from Gauteng, where it received fewer votes as a percentage than it did in 2014. Instead of leading another provincial government, it lost significant ground. This must have been a huge blow, not just for its rank and file, but also its leaders.

Then there is the bigger social issue that played a key role in this result.

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There is evidence that linguistic, class and racial groups in South Africa have been growing further apart over the last decade. The DA’s explicit offering to voters has been to be the party of the centre, where people from different races and classes come together.

If a country is pulling both to the left and the right and one party stands in the middle, that party could fall through the gap.

That last sentence hits the nail on the head. When you’re taking on two parties where voters have, at large, ignored scandal after scandal and gobbled up polarising rhetoric, trying to tick too many boxes and appeal to voters across various social and racial lines leads to confusion.

Poor results at the polls only further amplify that pressure:

When a political party does worse than expected, there is less patronage to go around, fewer positions for the faithful, which makes political decisions harder (to an extent, this may also be happening in the ANC after its results in May).

In the case of the DA, this contestation for fewer jobs could put more pressure on the fault-lines of race, class and language. Because of that, South Africa’s fissures, which the DA has tried to cut across, may be having a bigger impact in it than in other parties.

This can create the perception that the DA “does not know what it stands for”.

The case of DA MP Phumzile van Damme’s V&A Waterfront altercation is a good example of that, with it appearing that certain factions want her charged with wrongdoing, whilst others believe that a woman should be able to fight back when she believes she has been racially abused.

Van Damme is not taking the potential investigation lying down, tweeting her disapproval, but it points at a party being pulled in many different directions, when a single identity is needed, at least in the public eye.

Then there’s Helen Zille, who has become increasingly polarising on Twitter in recent years.

She has, it appears, deliberately provoked the right of the party, those white people (generally speaking) who might vote DA but feel it’s moved too far to the left. Her decision to join the Institute of Race Relations and her published pieces which keep her in the public eye are, at best, a distraction for the party. At worst, this could increase the pressure on those fissures, just as Maimane and Co are trying to patch them up.

She could give potential black voters for the DA a reason not to vote for the party, and other political parties an easy way to campaign against the DA. This makes life harder for its current leadership (one wonders how much whisky would be drunk were Ramaphosa and Maimane to have a late-night heart-to-heart about the former leaders of their parties…).

Sometimes, it pays to remain silent. In South Africa’s heated and turbulent political climate, though, Grootes believes that the DA needs decisive action, and soon:

Certainly, the longer the DA is silent, and the less interested its leaders appear in confronting the party’s problems, the more drift will set in. This could be fatal for the party. The DA contains representatives from many different sectors of our society, some of whom could feel the party doesn’t represent them and that they would be better off in an organisation that does fit in with their identity.

The time for their inaction, and for silence, is running out.

It’s still a solid five years until the next national election, and two years until the next municipal elections.

If the DA doesn’t want to lose further ground to opposition parties like the EFF and the Freedom Front Plus, there is plenty of work to be done, and plenty of tough decisions to be made.

[source:dailymaverick]