New DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis inherits a 25-year-old question from former French PM Lionel Jospin about whether his party can evolve from opposition to a genuine governing alternative – and he’s betting everything on a resounding “yes” for 2029, writes Tony Leon.
Last month, France’s former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin died aged 88. His death triggered a personal memory from 25 years back, coupled with an immediate political message on Sunday from the new DA leader, Geordin Hill-Lewis.
In June 2001, the DA was just one year old. And the battle to establish a robust opposition to the hegemonic ANC that dominated the whole of SA society back then – from its politics to its media and most of civil society – had just been joined.
The new DA leader, Hill-Lewis, accurately pinpointed the atmospherics prevailing in those early days after the DA’s formation. He reminded his party of those times:
“A time when many believed that South Africa did not need a strong opposition… [an understanding] that democracy required someone willing to speak uncomfortable truths. Someone willing to say what others would not say and to challenge power.”
As the “someone” referenced in his remarks, I also recall that while the ANC back then demonised the official opposition in Parliament, it would often – like a stopover at the Kruger National Park – schedule a meeting for visiting political tourists with the opposition leader. The government might disparage the concept of opposition at home, but adding its leader to a foreign politician’s itinerary burnished our democratic credentials abroad.
Hence my meeting at a Cape Town Waterfront hotel with Jospin in the winter of 2001.
‘Are you the opposition or the alternative?’
Jospin, with his wisps of white hair and earnest manner, looked more like a professor than a politician, and conducted the entire conversation in French, aided by an interpreter. Just as our encounter drew to its close, he leaned toward me and broke into perfect English, “Tell me”, he asked, “are you merely an opposition or are you likely to become an alternative?”
Answering that essential question has been a key task for each of the past four leaders of the DA. The results have been varied, and now the challenge of meeting it falls on the broad young shoulders of its fifth leader in 26 years, Cape Town Mayor Hill-Lewis.
Positioning over personality
Political leadership is as much a question of personality as it is about positioning. And here the rueful conclusion of Tony Blair, a winner better than all his successors, is both true and frustrating.
He defined the “paradox of leadership” – that power and knowledge are inversely aligned over time. He said:
You start at your most popular and least capable, and you end at your least popular and most capable.
In this regard, Hill-Lewis has a key advantage. He is a new national leader, but enters this office with significant executive experience.
Just over four years ago, Hill-Lewis was unknown to the residents of Cape Town. He was a young, fresh-faced man with an awkward name to fit on a poster. While his rise to mayoral candidate in the Mother City did not surprise DA insiders aware of his impressive, precocious talents, to the voting public, he was a blank slate.
Yet, after less than five years in office, he enjoys widespread popularity across political and community divides (the party recently doubled its support in a recent by-election in Du Noon township, an ANC stronghold). His governance is both considered and free from any scandal.
In pole position
By channelling copious amounts of personal empathy, political smarts and mastering his municipal brief, he starts in pole position for re-election as city mayor later this year.
His steady judgement and personal hinterland allow him to lead without rancorous divisiveness, absent an insecurity that discounts outside counsel (or sees a conspiracy behind any criticism). His inclusivity does not reflect an absence of ideas or that he lacks “a theory of the case”. Rather, it’s proof that EM Forster was right when he counselled, “Only connect.” These elements were on display in his debut speech as the new DA leader.
Now he faces the larger challenge: to take these attributes across the country and connect with South Africa at large.
While any good leader needs to make the political weather, there are a lot of turbulent elements beyond his control. Even the most agile political operator can be buffeted by events over which their influence is limited.
Domestically, for the DA, an ill wind blowing could be the renewed interest by key ANC constituencies in rejoining their ailing body to its severed limbs, in the form of the MK Party and the EFF. And the newly reconstituted provincial cabinet in Gauteng might be more than just a passing swallow.
Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala ghost 
President Cyril Ramaphosa complained to author Mandy Weiner that there was “no magic” in his relationship with the immediate past DA leader. However self-serving that remark or how the new DA leader resets relations with wily Ramaphosa, who knows the length or the political lifespan of the ANC president? The ghost of Phala Phala, via the declassified IPID report, has revived a spectre that potentially places the president at the centre of a criminal conspiracy. The looming Constitutional Court judgment could increase the pressure. Easy fodder for his internal opponents to both weaponise and externalise.
And if Phala Phala does not prematurely terminate Ramaphosa’s presidency, the outcome of his party’s elective conference in 2027 might do the job. And absent Ramaphosa – however indifferently he has treated the DA in GNU – the next ANC boss could excise the party altogether.
These are just some of the elements in the political weather (along with an increasingly unforgiving economic landscape aggravated by energy price shocks and market weakness) that the DA leader cannot control or influence.
However, what he does control is his party’s ability to obtain more votes and grow its support so that it becomes a larger element of the future governments of the country, and more influential in the current setup, so that its exclusion from national governance would imperil the country’s future.
This year’s municipal elections are important, but not conclusive. Every DA leader since 2000 has seen a rise in party support in each local government election conducted just after they entered office. This has a lot to do with both ANC local misconduct and voters’ willingness in municipal contests to punish the ANC, usually by abstaining from voting.
Yet, in every national election that followed the local polls, the DA has never matched its peak municipal percentages with an equivalent rise in national support.
Can Hill-Lewis buck this trend? He certainly starts with the wind behind his back following his congress triumph. His inaugural speech there was specific in both ambition and optimism.
‘Yes, we can’
And he went beyond the question asked 25 winters ago by a visiting French prime minister.
Hill-Lewis asked his enthusiastic members on Sunday two connected questions:
“The question is whether the Democratic Alliance can lead the country? Whether we can become the majority party in national government?”
His emphatic answer was, borrowing from another champion empathiser, Barack Obama:
Yes, my answer is a resounding ‘YES, yes, we can’. That is the mission you have assigned to me: to win the 2029 election.
That is his platform and prospectus: no longer the “junior partner in the national government, but leading that government”.
Some think placing such a large and specific target on your own back is risky. But treading water – cresting at around 20% national support – is arguably riskier.
Another US president referenced by the new DA leader was Theodore Roosevelt and his famous “Man in the Arena” speech.
He reminded “those cold and timid souls” that even failure, while “daring greatly”, is better than being the critic on the sidelines. On the other hand, there is always the chance of “the triumph of high achievement”.
How high the achievement reaches under the new DA leader is the most intriguing question in a suddenly refreshed political landscape.