Ryan Coetzee’s early career is studded with successes. It is not at all surprising that after his involvement as a young strategist for the Democratic Alliance in the early 2000s, he was set up for a bright future.

And a bright and jet-setting future it was, with Coetzee bouncing between the DA, the Liberal Democrats in the UK, and eventually an advisor to to the Saudi and Hong Kong governments.

But his strategy and performance in the recent past raises a few questions. His persistent condescension and moralistic finger-wagging on social media gives the impression of an expert dressing down a gallery of political amateurs, from America to the far East.

Despite this moralistic stance, Coetzee has shown little moral compunction in the sorts of political projects he undertakes, and his recent projects have seen a persistent streak of failures.

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Rise

Coetzee got in on the ground floor of the DA, back when it was still called the DP in 1991, and held single digits in the General Assembly. He was fresh out of university and recruited by Tony Leon to help lead campaign strategy, under Gregory Krumbock.

Having served in parliament for four years, and gained a reputation for being quick-witted and hard working, Ryan rose to become party CEO, where he is credited with a thorough reorganisation of the party and straightening out of a messy financial department, in time for crucial elections which saw Helen Zille take the Western Cape Premiership.

He resigned from senior party management to join Helen Zille as a special advisor. But he was succeeded by Jonathan Moakes, part of the left-wing coalition that soon parachuted in Mmusi Maimane, decriminalised land invasions, advocated for BEE, lambasted white people for their “privilege”, and praised Winnie Mandela and other poisonous communists.

But while by all accounts, Ryan is excellent at whipping financial departments into shape and acting the slavedriver, it is questionable whether his strategic thinking matches his managerial capacity.

Krumbock’s longstanding efforts have been recognised as central, even essential, to the success of the party. He passed away after managing the 2024 election campaign, and was eulogised by the DA as the single strut upon which their success in campaigning rested:

“the silent architect behind many of the DA’s electoral successes, a strategic mastermind who understood the intricacies of the political landscape better than most. His operational brilliance and meticulous planning were instrumental in turning the DA into a formidable electoral machine, capable of weathering the storms and seizing opportunities.”

Under Krumbock, the DA rose from a fringe party with a good rhetorical stance, to the largest opposition party, and even weathered the disaster of Maimane’s destructive far-left ideological capture without losing more than a few percentage points.

Considering the strength of Krumbock’s capabilities, one must wonder whether Coetzee’s career traded on his success. When the DA hit their peak in 2011, Coetzee traded up for higher posts on foreign shores. But even then, the DA owes most of their success to factors well beyond their control. There was no need for genius here, just a good work ethic and some professional discipline.

The South African electorate votes rather strictly along racial lines - to this day, the ANC and its splinter parties together continue to hold 2/3rds of the vote, and the DA and the National Party, if added together, similarly form a flat line at just above 20%.

The National Party was collapsing - they had no ability to push the ideological position that kept them in power for 36 years under the previous regime, and could not appear sincere under any new ideology. They soon fell apart, and after a brief merger with the DA, most departed to join the ANC for plum jobs.

The DP/DA were well positioned to soak up their blood, as the minorities started looking for alternatives to the corrupt and racist ANC, who were aggressively alienating not just whites, but non-white minorities too.

By 2011, the DA had reached the peak of their performance, and it was time to cash in on the reputational success.

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Departure

After riding the blue wave, Coetzee caught a job with the Liberal Democrats in the UK, as they were in the middle of a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservative Party. As an inherently boring party, they rest their success on maintaining wealthy constituents and timid young conformists who dislike controversy.

The latter group had hung onto Nick Clegg’s promises for free university tuition, but having been let down by Clegg’s complete capitulation to the Tories in the coalition, were starting to balk.

He devised a rather timid and risk averse strategy called “Hold”, which attempted to conserve existing gains rather than pursue growth. He pushed for the slogan “Stronger Economy, Fairer Society”, aiming to champion the policies of the Tories and claim them to be unequivocal success, instead of positioning themselves in a critical position, in order to secure good relations with the Tories.

Under Coetzee’s advice, the Lib-Dems had no independent vision, and offered voters nothing tangible or different. They fell from 57 seats to just eight, an utter rout which saw the departure of their senior leadership. Their key votes were sucked up by the widely-mocked Green Party and the Labour Party who was then led by the legendarily uncharismatic, goofy and pathetic Ed Miliband.

Coetzee was also paid from government funds for his services to the Liberal-Democrat campaign, which caused significant outcry. This is of course a misappropriation of public funds, but the money was not repaid, as far as I can tell from the news archives.

Despite this clear failure, Coetzee was recruited to the Remain campaign by the poisonous mandarin of Fabian Society Peter Mandelson, to fight against Brexit.

Mandelson is widely known for his political acumen, but also for his utter disregard for any form of morality, and together with Alistair Campbell and Tony Blair, orchestrated the destruction of civil liberties and traditional institutions in the UK, as well as the total demographic transformation of the UK into a society with systematically privileges foreigners over natives, and covered up mass organised Pakistani rape gangs. Their deliberate concoction of a fictional risk of nuclear weapons in Iraq was used to stoke American and public support for the Iraq war, which destroyed the country, handed it to Iran’s sphere of influence, and birthed the holocaust of ISIS.

But Coetzee welcomed the opportunity, because he considers any degree of national sovereignty or immigration control to be anathema to human decency. His role was in crafting the core narrative messaging, and coordinating and aligning the elite class who supported the status quo. He pushed on two fronts - the economy will be better in the EU, and the Leave campaign are bigots. It was dubbed “project fear”, and widely denigrated as transparently cynical.

His traditional data-driven, swing-voter targeting technocratic approach lost to the simpler and more nimble Leave campaign, which simply pushed the concept of national sovereignty, spearheaded by maverick political strategist Dominic Cummings, whose career went in the complete opposite direction to Coetzee’s - beginning with an ambitious failure to launch an airline in Russia, and managing to avoid any endorsement of mass murders in his path to the successful dislodging of Britain from the EU.

Regarding the moral iniquity of the Fabians whom he worked for, Coetzee seems to have been untroubled. As he said in the aftermath of his failures in the Remain campaign, “The leave campaign has done more to damage Britain's international reputation than anything since Iraq.”

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Consulum

Coetzee has spent the past decade in business with the staff of the disgraced PR firm Bell Pottinger, in an outfit called Consulum.

For those of you with a short memory, Bell Pottinger is the firm who stoked a media frenzy against white South Africans on behalf of Jacob Zuma, in order to distract from his corruption charges and the smouldering problem of Marikana. Bell Pottinger used social media and print media to push an extremist racial black propaganda campaign, and introduced the concept of “white monopoly capital” to the broader population, previously a niche bit of jargon from the American black nationalist fringe in the 1970s. Their campaign alleged a sort of hivemind racial conspiracy to enslave and destroy black South Africans, evoking the genocidal rhetoric used to stoke antisemitism in Nazi Germany. After their involvement was exposed, the company was dissolved, but not before their management reformed under a new banner as a PR and government consultancy called Consulum.

Coetzee was recruited on the ground floor, and helped Hong Kong defend the crackdown on democratic protesters resisting integration with the Chinese mainland government (and subsequent abolition of liberal democracy and freedom of expression), as well as the Saudi government in various PR and development projects.

However, his harsh and brittle management style eventually led to mass staff burnout, and such high staff turnover that it jeopardised the quality of several major projects, leading to the company losing contracts, and is now being sold to Stagwell, a marketing consultancy from the UK.

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Return

In 2019, after James Selfe and the rest of the left wing of the DA began to lose ground in the wake of Mmusi Maimane’s mimicry of the ANC (including the promotion of BEE, decriminalisation of land invasions, attacking “white privilege” and praise for extremists like Winnie Mandela), Coetzee was briefly parachuted back into the country by the Zille clique, and together with Tony Leon, penned a report on the weaknesses of the party platform.

Understanding that the DA could never get black votes without losing minorities, and that a nonracial stance (necessary to hold onto minority support) would impose a hard 4% ceiling on their share of the black electorate (who are far too racist to let go of their legal privileges), they advocated booting out Maimane and installing the dim-witted puppet John Steenhuisen - a cuddly white face that reassured minorities - both on the swart gevaar front, and on the rainbow-kumbaya front - a cheerful and convivial, chummy sort of figure, with no spine or political edge of his own, easy to control.

In 2024, Greg Krumbock took one final swing at putting the DA in power, and finally succeeded. But it was a pyrrhic victory. The negotiation for the new coalition was negotiated by Coetzee, who gave up every possible advantage, and turned down every option to exercise leverage against the ANC.

He failed to extract any public commitments to a common vision, despite advice from the far-more experienced leaders in the Vryheidsfront Plus, who have been working under and surviving in conditions of extremely limited leverage for decades now.

The belligerent approach to metro coalitions that Zille had taken was now replaced with a comprehensive position of capitulation, and the DA copied all of the ANC’s policies without any pushback or reform, in every one of the departments they took over.

They have attacked the Solidariteit movement, the largest representatives of their core voters, and defended the reforms leading toward expropriation without compensation.

Judging by the recent polls, their support is stable, but according to insiders, they have swapped much of their loyal minority support for a fickle and easily reversed black support, the latter of which has been seen in several post-election seasons before.

What the 2026/27 local elections hold in store for the DA will now depend on whether their minority opposition can get their act together - Dr. Corné Mulder is holding his cards close to his chest, but leaving the GNU will be prerequisite for being able to offer an alternative and avoid the mistakes of Coetzee in his handling of the LibDems.

The Cape Independence movement is crippled by a lack of leadership and funding, and will likely fare underwhelmingly, unless they can secure some fresh faces and harness the newfound Western animosity toward the South African government.

But regardless of their performance, the DA is almost guaranteed to suffer from voter apathy and protest voting.

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Who are you anyway?

Coetzee has remained an intractable partisan for the trans-Atlantic liberal elite, and defends all establishment policies regardless of quality or impact. He even defended Ramaphosa’s insane, mercurial and schizophrenic lockdown policies as “science-based”.

He is too intelligent to defend ANC policy directly, or to champion any of their leaders. But his firm opposition to any force that could reform the country in a lasting and significant way means that his is consistently a council of defeat in the face of decline.

While he is indifferent to woke policies and left wing extremism, Coetzee’s political philosophy is more or less a synthesis of Fabian Socialist domestic policy and Neoconservative foreign policy, and generally champions Tony Blair’s philosophy of governance, as does Helen Zille and Fabian cheerleader Leon Schreiber.

Despite his blithe complicity with dictatorships, hate-mongers, and police-states, Coetzee expresses a commitment to liberalism: “I remain rather partial to my formulation, which borrows from [Amartya] Sen, that liberalism concerns the promotion of “substantive freedom” which means each person having ‘the right, space and opportunity” to be themselves and live a life they value.’ Each terms very carefully chosen.”

After all his favourite group of Fabians have wrought to destroy the UK, his work with Saudi Arabia, the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong, and his insistence on capitulation to the ANC on almost every policy area, it is a perplexing task to square this liberal philosophy with the strategies he endorses or the company he keeps.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of Ryan's career and his policy sensibilities are the notion of "respectability". But this respectability is framed in extremely classist terms. Rather than pursuing the good of his people, he pursues the international, because it has higher prestige. Rather than stick to a strict set of principles, he chases money and promotion. Rather than take controversial stances that would cut through stasis, he endorse whatever is safest.

Coetzee has the temperament of a highschool headboy - smart enough to top the academic charts, charming enough to brownnose the teachers, insecure enough to bully the 8th graders, but too cowardly to stake his reputation on anything unpopular, and too petty to look the other way for the delinquents who might chafe against irrationally overbearing school policy.

But by now, he has so deeply ingrained the thinking of his superiors in the food chain that he may have no hope for understanding the rot in the system. He is stuck in the 1990s, unaware that the ideas of that time have created a world far different than the one they hoped.

And at some point, the tide will pass him by. But until substantive change occurs, he is free from any need for introspection.

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