Helen Zille once warned voters that supporting a smaller opposition party was an inadvertent way of returning the ANC to power.
Two years into the government of national unity (GNU), that warning presents an awkward question for her own party: has a vote for the DA also become a vote for the ANC?
The allegation is not entirely fair, but then again, neither is it entirely frivolous.
Back in 2024, South Africans might not have removed the ANC from power, but they certainly did something more politically consequential: they removed its majority and ended its right to govern alone. After that landmark election, the ANC remained the largest party, but it could not re-elect Cyril Ramaphosa as president, pass budgets or form a government without opposition support. The DA then used its parliamentary muscle to keep Ramaphosa in the presidency and the ANC at the centre of government.
In KwaZulu-Natal, where the MK Party emerged as the largest party but fell short of a majority, the DA joined an IFP-led provincial coalition that also retained the ANC in government.
Both nationally and in the hotbed of Kwazulu-Natal, the DA helped construct a governing centre designed principally to exclude MK and the EFF.
There were defensible reasons for doing so. Investors feared that an ANC coalition with MK and the EFF would weaken fiscal discipline, constitutional institutions and property rights. This would have been dangerous, disrupting economic reforms in energy, logistics and public administration just as results were beginning to emerge.
The GNU promised constitutional stability, disciplined economic management and an opportunity for the DA and other parties to constrain the ANC from the inside. Almost immediately, the economic mood brightened. Electricity supply improved, structural reforms began to take root and, South Africa was removed from the Financial Action Task Force grey list. More recently, we saw the country’s first sovereign credit-rating upgrade in two decades.
Now it’s true that the GNU cannot claim sole credit for those developments, but the fact that it has survived more than two years has reduced the country’s political-risk premium.
So what does this all mean for the DA?
Well first, it can legitimately argue that it did not betray its mandate. It used that mandate to prevent a riskier government, protect the constitutional order and pull policy towards the economic centre.
But equally, the fact that this coalition was justified doesn’t give the DA a permanent exemption from explaining what it has become.
Where does this leave the DA then? As an opposition party still seeking to replace the ANC? Or as the ANC’s indispensable constitutional insurance policy?
November 4th, the date of the local government elections, will provide us with an answer.
All the polling suggests that several metros will again produce hung councils. The latest Ipsos survey has the ANC at 31% and the DA at 27% in Joburg, and closely matched in other urban centres. Ipsos has the DA ahead in Tshwane and the MK dominant in eThekwini.
As we all know, there’s nothing like an imminent election to force a dose of pragmatism.
In April, Zille appeared categorical that the DA would not work with the ANC, MK or EFF in Johannesburg. But by July, her position had changed.
“You don’t know what coalition you’re going to have until after the elections because you don’t know what options you’re going to get,” she said. “If we don’t get to 50% plus one, we will look at the options and we will take the least bad option. They will all be bad, but we will take the least bad.”
DA leader Geordin Hill-Lewis made that calculation even clearer.
“We went into government with the ANC to prevent the MK Party and the EFF from taking government, but it might not replicate itself in other areas,” he said. “We will have to look at the least worst option everywhere, and it will be different everywhere.”
This demonstrates how deep we are in coalition territory. The DA is leaving the door open to agreement with the ANC in places where the DA reckons every other governing arrangement would be worse. In other words, the GNU may not be replicated wholesale across the metros, but its governing logic could be.
For the DA, that logic is simple: when voters produce no majority, the DA will choose the arrangement it considers least damaging, even if keeps the ANC in office.
Dressed for investment
Of course, the DA doesn’t need a formal coalition to keep the ANC in municipal power. It could, for instance, support an ANC administration on budgets and confidence motions, tolerate an ANC-led minority government, or conclude issue-by-issue agreements while remaining formally in opposition.
But this can get messy — as it did in Ekurhuleni.
In that corruption-ridden metro, the DA helped the city pass its budget after extracting concessions, even while describing the administration as a failing ANC-led coalition. That was not a formal coalition agreement as such, but it showed that political cooperation does not require sharing the executive.
The November election also offers the coalition parties an opportunity to honour a very specific undertaking in their founding statement of intent: “stabilising local government, effective cooperative governance.”
This matters because the credibility of the coalition cannot ultimately be separated from municipal performance. National reforms mean little if the cities responsible for water and electricity, maintaining roads, and collecting revenue continue to fall apart.
And these metros control huge budgets, employ thousands of people and oversee the infrastructure on which the urban economy depends.
Take Joburg. The richest city in sub-Saharan Africa, it accounts for about 15% of the country’s GDP. Yet the National Treasury recently withheld funding from Joburg and 60 other municipalities after they failed to address irregular expenditure and glaring fiscal breaches. Altogether, these municipalities recorded R40bn in irregular expenditure in a single year.
The shape of the coalitions are so important because they’ll determine whether businesses receive electricity, whether property developers get approvals in any reasonable time, and whether the cities are able to service their debt. As it is, billions of rand in capital will be needed to reverse urban decline — and much of this will have to come from the private sector.
Johannesburg wants private investors to help reclaim and redevelop derelict and hijacked inner-city buildings into safe residential, commercial and mixed-use properties. Similar partnerships will be needed to repair water systems and various other neglected parts of these municipalities.
But private investors won’t do this if mayors are just replaced every few months. Just as urban renewal won’t happen if billing systems collapse, planning applications remain wedged in molasses and municipalities are beholden to criminal syndicates.
In other words, business wants at a local level what it wanted nationally: stability, credible financial management and a broad political centre capable of making decisions.
But the DA should remember there is an important caveat: the “least bad option” cannot mean preserving ANC power regardless of how decisively voters reject its municipal record. A grand coalition that merely divides positions and procurement between the two largest parties would only reproduce the political protectionism that voters wanted to bring to an end.
So, any agreement between the ANC and DA has to include strict conditions: a public coalition contract, professional appointments, measurable service-delivery targets, protection for officials who enforce financial rules, and harsh consequences for corruption.
‘Don’t be a pushover’
As it is, there is a political cost to the DA in any such municipal coalition.
Black middle-class voters, for instance, may be alienated from ANC corruption and administrative failure, even if they aren’t natural DA voters. While any coalition gives the DA an opportunity to demonstrate competence, it also blurs the alternative it offers them.
So, to show that its support for the ANC isn’t unconditional, it must prove that any such agreement is productive and crisply focused on reform. There must be visible achievements, identifiable red lines and a convincing account of how it intends eventually to replace the ANC, rather than remain its permanent junior partner.
November 4 will therefore determine more than who runs Johannesburg, Tshwane and other hotly-contested councils. It will show whether the GNU’s promise to stabilise local government can be translated into functioning cities.
If cooperation with the ANC is sometimes the DA’s least bad option, it must say so honestly and explain the conditions. Otherwise, Zille’s old warning will acquire a damaging new meaning: the shortest route back to ANC government may run not through a small party, but through the DA itself.
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