John Steenhuisen exits after criticism while Hill-Lewis leads race. DA needs more than GNU success to win diverse voter.
It is an exaggeration to view the DA as being at a crossroads, facing some sort of existential crisis ahead of the gathering over the weekend where a new Leader will be elected.
That name is, in itself, an possible glimpse at how the party views itself: the Leader has a capital L… emphasising perhaps the Messianic nature of the person who will lead them out of the desert?
Imagery aside, the sounds emanating from within the DA are upbeat, buoyed – as we point out today – by the numbers it gets at polling stations and the sentiment it generates across social and other media.
Party insiders sympathetic to outgoing leader John Steenhuisen, who has been pilloried by critics of late for his handling of the foot-and-mouth disease crisis as minister of agriculture, say he deserves more credit than he gets for improving the party’s footprint.
Yet, his successor – who is looking more and more likely to be Cape Town mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis – will still have to convince many voting fence-sitters that the DA deserves support at the upcoming local government elections and, then, in the national poll in 2029.
It’s going to take some convincing – despite what the DA glee club keeps saying – to get black voters to buy into its vision for the future.
However, DA’s success in the portfolios it controls in the government of national unity (GNU) will not have gone unnoticed by middle-class, middle-of-the-road South Africans – of all colours – who see the country spiralling downwards.
While the GNU performance is a good marketing tool, the lack of black high-flyers – or those who don’t seem to be cut down with monotonous regularity by the white party bosses – is something which will be stark if yet another white man gets the leadership nod.
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