Helen Zille has changed the game. In Joburg, buckling under the strain of gross financial mismanagement and receding service delivery, she has made the forthcoming local government election all about technical competence and financial discipline.
She has done so through a campaign like no other ever mounted by a South African politician, discarding the virtue-signalling playbook for one based on whether or not potholes will be fixed, hostels will be made liveable, and water will be reliable.
Brandishing a relentless in-your-face muscular centrism that prizes getting things done properly over the ANC’s voodoo politics of elite empowerment, she is talking the language of citizens across the country who just want the books balanced and the lights and water to stay on.
It was not long ago that Zille was the lightning rod for the politically correct who aggressively attacked her robust social media commentary, which appeared to ignore the rules of polite society. These days, they sheepishly profess their support for her as the value of their properties faces catastrophic decline. Some who declined to support her on the grounds that ‘her time is up’ and ‘she is toxic’ when she was in the DA’s national leadership, are less squeamish now that their bottom lines sink into the red.
Choices narrow and coffee-shop chatter matters less as circumstances dictate and decline.
In the old politics, a multitude of historical sins of accumulation could be brushed away with a shake of the head at Zille – a cheap but instant ice-breaker with an ANC increasingly basing its credibility on its historical role amidst a sea of contemporary failings.
It must be said that not all business was playing this game. Some were committed to solving the actual problems by helping reform electricity generation and logistics mired in decades of rent-seeking. While without the robust public campaigning of Zille, this was another example of the shift towards getting things done, making things work and bringing order to chaos that is the new politics of South Africa.
Clicks and distorters
The test of whether or not this approach will win the day with voters will, of course, come in the November local government elections, where Zille and a slate of other candidates are tapping into a discontent of the masses over services.
The significance of this new politics of the centre deserves attention.
Over the last three decades, left- and right-wing populism have come to dominate political discourse. This has come about as the world has moved away from legacy media to social media platforms as the primary means of mass communication.
The traditional arc of the political news report — a reporter gathering data and comments, submitting this to a news editor followed by a process of fact-checking, sub-editing and, finally, proofreading — has been replaced by a new journalism that prizes speed, the number of clicks and “going viral”.
In fairness, this search for “attention” at any cost in the media had already been underway for decades, as media sources multiplied while the time people had to consume media did not keep pace. Red-top tabloids and the advent of sensationalism in the mainstream media are evidence of this.
As far back as 1971, the Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon came up with the term “the attention economy”. He pointed out that while information was abundant, it was axiomatic that attention was in increasingly short supply as news vendors chased sales to an audience with more and more choice.
He wrote how abundant information causes a “dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes”, adding that a “wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
It was a prescient observation. But Simon could not have anticipated the explosion of information that would follow technological progress since the 1990s, with the Internet, social media and now AI opening up entire worlds where fake news lives alongside credible journalism but is increasingly difficult to distinguish.
Populist platforms
Whereas in pre-internet — and pre-syndicated television — days you had to buy a newspaper, choosing between a handful of brands at your local outlet, you now have access to the entire global output of news in seconds on your phone. How many news articles are produced a day? Nobody knows, although some suggest it runs into the millions. And these may well be amplified into billions now by AI.
Overwhelmed by information, most consumers now allocate their scarce time to the media that shout the loudest and are the easiest to consume. These are often the videos they encounter on social media platforms.
The first wave of this media consumption favoured populist messages that resonated with a local grievance and explained modern politics as a Manichaean game between the good and the bad. To help consumers along their journey to taking sides, social media has developed algorithms that helpfully only expose you to more of what you believe in.
This has resulted in polarisation that favours extreme messaging. Try saying that both Israel and Palestine have legitimate grievances if you want to test this hypothesis.
But the result of this polarisation has not been an improvement in governance. Instead, we have entered an era of lower accountability for politicians who decry fake news when their shortcomings are exposed to loyal followers happy to fight their battles for them on social media.
The problem with populism of this sort is that it fails to deliver except for the clique that runs the political machinery. Unable to understand or make rational economic choices, the populists are eventually undone by the disjuncture between their promises and the facts on the ground. A sea-change in how voters approach their decision-making may be beginning.
Lessons from Hungary
This has been the case in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán attempted to become president for life, selling a populist nationalism that cloaked a regime focused on making life better for the Fidez elite.
Orbán described Hungary as “an illiberal state, a non-liberal state,” and professed his admiration for China, Russia, and Turkey. Hungarians, possessing a unique language and determined to preserve their identity, saw him as their saviour.
Ruling for 16 years, he consolidated his party’s control over democratic institutions and diminished the space for opposition, critical journalism, academic freedom and NGOs — pretty much the ANC’s playbook under Mbeki and then Zuma. Hungary’s status as “Free” was reduced to “Party Free” by the Freedom House index.
But, unable to move the Hungarian economy onto a competitive footing and fully take advantage of European integration, he was eventually undone by a muscular centrism focused on returning to rational economics. In April 2026, opposition leader Péter Magyar and the Tisza party won a massive electoral victory after the largest turnout in a democratic election in Hungary.
Far from being the permanent “next stage” of global politics, the period of extreme populism may be viewed by history as the period when politicians fooled most of the people some of the time before the sobering reality of their rule dawned.
Unseating populism will, however, not be undertaken by the usual SMH liberalism that tut-tuts about how terrible things are before producing yet another paper which is cautiously critical while studiously avoiding any social media snakepits except for those in the know, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. These tut-tuts are usually followed by going down to the cellar to count the gold, quietly moving more and more of it offshore while professing a deep love for the country.
It will be defeated by a muscular populism of the centre.
In South Africa, Helen Zille is drawing up the playbook and executing it, one pothole and set of swimming goggles at a time. She is competing for the throne in the attention economy where Julius Malema, Jacob Zuma and Fikile Mbalula once ruled, as she uses TikTok, Facebook, X and Instagram to send a relentless barrage of criticism. More than that, she is projecting herself as a fixer, as a blue army repairs potholes, fixes security at a women’s hostel and puts up solar-powered water pumps.
A different breed of this approach can be found where business is working with government to implement reforms, insisting on corruption-free and competent solutions that address technical competence and enable implementation.
On this new political dynamic hangs the future of South Africa.