The DA’s harshest critics are currently their own voters. Even the most cursory inspection of its own social media platforms reveal a supporter base dumbfounded at the DA’s lack of fortitude. In her News24 article, “Can the DA blink again? GNU on the brink”, Carol Paton accurately chronicles the DA’s capitulation on the composition of cabinet, the BELA Bill, and its underwhelming response thus far on Expropriation.

The question then becomes, why? The DA are a long established political party with a well deserved reputation for running a highly sophisticated political operation. They are anything but naive, so how have they found themselves in this situation?

The answer lies not in the GNU itself, but in what it represents to them. 

If the DA was purely interested in presenting itself as a superior political alternative to the ANC, MK, and EFF, then all it has to do is leave the GNU, allow any combination of the three parties to conclusively demonstrate their complete inability to govern South Africa in anything even approaching a competent manner, and wait in the wings to pick up the pieces.

The flaw in this plan is that regardless of how badly the ANC, MK, and EFF perform, the majority of voters will still not vote DA. A lot has been written about how the ANC lost 18% percentage points in the 2024 elections, reducing them to the status of a minority party. Much less has been written about how the voters that left them turned to MK and not the DA. The DA has a glass ceiling on electoral support and nobody knows this better than the DA itself.

For more than a decade the DA have had a clear strategy to deal with their electoral glass ceiling, and it involves a coalition with the ANC.

As I wrote on multiple occasions from the day the ‘Moonshot Pact’ was announced, the Moonshot Pact which later became known as the Multi-Party Charter (MPC) was a ruse. It never had even the remotest chance of delivering a parliamentary majority without either the ANC or the EFF, and whilst the DA may like to pretend otherwise, that was never the DA’s intention. The MPC was designed to shore up support for the DA at the expense of its ‘coalition’ partners and it worked to perfection. The DA reaped the rewards, the FF Plus and Action SA paid the price. 

The DA’s ultimate plan was always a coalition with the ‘good ANC’. Anyone who has had any dealings with Helen Zille will know this to be true because she has spent the last decade drawing her famed triangle illustration via which she outlined this strategy to all willing to listen. For those denied the opportunity in person, the famous ‘leaked video recording’ of Zille explaining this plan to DA activists serves the same purpose..

The GNU is the final realisation of the DA’s grand plan, a strategy 15 years in the making. Every single one of the DA’s eggs are in this political basket. If the GNU fails, the DA quite literally have no plan whatsoever through which to deliver their model of governance nationally. They cannot achieve a majority themselves, and they cannot pull together a coalition through which they can achieve their political objectives. They would become an eternal opposition journeyman destined forever to be a price taker rather than a price maker.

The DA are painfully aware of this reality, and therein lies the basis of their reticence to press any issue within the GNU beyond breaking point. If they break the GNU, they will have demonstrated the fatal flaw in their own strategy. What would the DA then offer the electorate in 2029? They would now be the party who had proven themselves unable to hold together a coalition in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Nelson Mandela Bay, and nationally, and the party which could not prevent Expropriation without compensation, the destruction of the private health sector, and the marginalisation of Afrikaners.

The DA would also come under increased pressure in the Western Cape. How would they defend against an undoubtedly ressurgent Cape Independence movement, if all they have to offer is a permanent future under the yolk of far left African Nationalists?

It is against this backdrop that John Steenhuisen emphasised that his protest against the Expropriation Bill was not an ultimatum, and meekly pleaded for the ANC to treat his party better. Steenhuisen positively radiated weakness, something the DA have been doing from day one of the coalition when they found out on live TV that the Cabinet had been expanded to maintain ANC hegemony, and opted to do nothing about it.

The problem with broadcasting your weakness, is that it feeds your opponents strength and the ANC are now palpably in the ascendancy.

In my opinion, the DA has one card left to play. They must table a notion of no confidence in Ramaphosa and attempt to bring him to heel. The ANC does not need the DA in the GNU, Ramaphosa however does. MK and the EFF are waiting eagerly in the wings, but the likely price of their support will be the scalp of Ramaphosa. There is no guarantee of success for the DA, but the alternative is a certain and ignominious defeat.

Should the GNU collapse, and that now looks increasingly likely, the current political era is at an end. The politics of Zimbabwe will be upon us. When they are, self-determination for minority communities will no longer be an ideological discussion point, it will become the essential means of survival. You cannot place your fate in the hands of a unitary state, when it is governed by destructive ideological zealots to whom you are vehemently opposed.

This is precisely why self-determination is an undeniable and inalienable human right to which all peoples are entitled.

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