John Steenhuisen has kicked off his campaign to be re-elected as DA leader. At this stage, six months out from the party’s internal elections, no rivals for the DA top post have publicly presented themselves.

Rumours have swirled around two possible contenders: former DA Western Cape leader Bonginkosi Madikizela, and current Johannesburg mayor Mpho Phalatse.

But Madikizela, who resigned his posts in April 2021 after being outed by Daily Maverick as having lied on his CV, is apparently happy for the time being to focus on his business interests.

Phalatse, meanwhile, has her hands full with the shenanigans in the Joburg metro – meaning she is unlikely to have the time or energy to launch a full-throated bid for the leadership. Steenhuisen is undoubtedly aware of this, in terms of the early timing of his campaign launch: he has revealed himself to be an extremely shrewd – not to mention cutthroat – political operator with regard to this kind of thing in the past.

The party’s elections, scheduled for April 2023, are still sufficiently distant for a rival for the DA top job to appear. But party insiders say it won’t matter. There is simply nobody in the DA currently who can launch a credible bid against Steenhuisen, and as such his campaign is a mere formality. Steenhuisen will win his second term.

Steenhuisen’s platform: stability and consistency

The DA leader’s first major selling point is: stability.

Steenhuisen has told party members via email, and reiterated at his campaign launch in Cape Town recently, that his leadership from November 2020 has steered the DA into calm waters from the troubled murk in which the party was previously flailing around.

Steenhuisen’s second selling point: ideological consistency.

“Without a firm commitment to a core set of principles, the party wobbled around like a big blue jelly, alienating voters across all communities,” he said in his Cape Town launch.

“Fortunately, those days are gone.”

That’s a bold statement from a man who has, in his personal capacity, managed to alienate both a string of black DA leaders and the conservative veteran commentator RW Johnson.

Johnson, in September, took exception to Steenhuisen’s puerile insults about his ex-wife on a widely-disdained podcast, writing: “I couldn’t vote for a man who behaves so despicably and then refuses even to apologise. The last thing I want is to have such a person representing me.”

(A tiny Daily Maverick poll at the same time found, by a fractional majority, that our readers felt Steenhuisen should step down.)

The point is, Steenhuisen is a rather more divisive figure to the wider South African public than his internal campaigning suggests.

But there is, of course, some truth to his messaging. In recent months in particular, there have been far fewer reports of factional fights within the DA. There have been fewer leaks to the media, and less internal mess spilling out into the public domain in general.

Steenhuisen has adopted a more statesmanlike persona, with the notable exception of the podcast incident. To give an example, he has stopped raging against the media as the architects of all the DA’s misfortune. 

At times, his newfound gravitas has tipped into self-parody (remember the “fact-finding mission” to Ukraine?), but in general he has appeared to don the mantle of party leader with greater credibility as time has gone by.

But the flipside of the “stability” coin is that it appears that internal contestation, of all kinds, is dying a slow death within South Africa’s second-largest political party.

The fact that public dissent has been reduced obviously owes something fairly substantial to the exodus of vocal DA figures since Steenhuisen took office. Are those who remain all single-mindedly committed to the same project, as Steenhuisen would have us believe, or merely cowed into compliance?

Does the fact that nobody will stand against Steenhuisen suggest overwhelming support for his leadership, or a lack of energy to launch a rival bid? One might think that a party which is alive with ideas, debate, energy and passion would be able to produce at least one other contender.

This is not the first time the DA congress has faced this situation. In 2018, Mmusi Maimane was re-elected unopposed. Then again, the problem could be as simple as financial. As one party insider put it – to have a credible shot at launching a leadership campaign, you have to either be personally wealthy or an extremely good fundraiser.

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Eyes on 2024 general elections

As things stand, Steenhuisen will lead the DA into the 2024 general elections. That poll represents the most significant opportunity in South Africa’s post-democratic history for opposition parties to make serious inroads into power – but can the DA get the job done?

Steenhuisen has told his supporters that, on average, the party’s recent by-election performance is improving – which could bode well for the national ballot. The DA’s form in the 2021 local government elections under Steenhuisen saw a decline from the 2016 polls under Maimane, though Steenhuisen tried to claim the opposite after the fact.

Can he buck this trend in 2024?   

Analysts aren’t so sure, with Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA and the Freedom Front Plus presenting ongoing headaches.

Looking at 2022 by-election results so far, elections analyst Dawie Roodt tweeted that the DA’s performance was “stable at best” among black voters, but that this would probably drop if Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA contested more widely; that the DA’s support among white voters was being knocked by both the Freedom Front Plus and ActionSA; and only among coloured voters did the DA see substantial recovery.

Daily Maverick’s elections number-cruncher Wayne Sussman has also pointed out that in suburban areas where the DA has recently won big, ActionSA has not been on the ballot.

What recent trends suggest in general, Sussman has written, is that ActionSA is “likely to grow at the expense of parties like the DA in suburban wards”.

The ANC may be at its weakest ebb in history, in other words, but the DA is not the only game in town – and voters are very much aware.

Steenhuisen and Zille sitting in a tree

Then there’s Steenhuisen’s Helen Zille problem. That Steenhuisen and Zille have been operating as a leadership duo is no secret, and at times – something RW Johnson also alluded to in his Steenhuisen critique – it has been hard to discern which of the two is really in charge.   

Certainly it appears Zille has been leading all coalition-related business. This may well be perfectly in order, in terms of the DA’s arcane taxonomy of top leadership posts – federal chair vs federal executive chair – and their associated job descriptions, but the public has been left in no doubt that Zille is calling the shots. It is she, not Steenhuisen, who gives the media interviews around coalition affairs.

Zille doubtless brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to these negotiations, but she remains a PR liability and a tweeting loose cannon with an aggravating preoccupation with cultural debates borrowed wholesale from the USA.

Yet Zille (71) is standing again for another term as the DA’s federal chair at the party’s next elections.

Is the Zille-Steenhuisen ride-or-die combo the banner under which the DA’s representatives want to enter the most fungible general elections in South Africa’s democratic history? More is at stake than ever before. DM