A common perception of the Democratic Alliance is that it has gradually drifted to the ideological right over the last decade. We examined the evidence. We were curious: has the DA really drifted rightwards over the last decade, as some observers claim?
Assessing the DA’s ideological positioning over time is not straightforward. For a start, no political party is entirely homogenous: individual members and representatives may hold different views on issues and articulate those in different ways, although they are still bound by the same core values and belief that the party is the best political vehicle to serve the country. As such, in assessing the evidence, we focused as much as possible on election manifestos, policy papers and statements made in public by the party’s federal leader of the time — rather than utterances by individual MPs or spokespeople.
A policy team drafts proposals, which are then voted on by delegates at the DA’s policy conferences. As such, to refer to “Zille’s policies” or “Maimane’s manifesto”, as we do here, is reductive but operates as shorthand for the leadership era in question — recognising also that a party’s political culture is influenced to at least some degree from the top. Another aspect to acknowledge is that politicians respond to what is happening in real time, reflecting the culture of the moment, but also the events.
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Foreign policy has, in recent years, developed a much greater prominence in the DA’s messaging. That doesn’t automatically reflect a shift in the party’s priorities; it also simply reflects the extraordinary international events that have taken place during this period — such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and a more prominent role played by the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa in these events. Mmusi Maimane’s leadership of the DA, between 2015 and 2019, arguably coincided with the cultural period future historians will record as Peak Woke, while the leadership of John Steenhuisen (2020-current) has taken place in a context of a concerted backlash against progressive values in many spaces globally.
This in itself might go some way towards explaining why the DA’s 2019 election manifesto, under Maimane, has a whole section on combating discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people. There is no mention of the LGBTIQ+ community in Steenhuisen’s main 2024 manifesto, though the current DA policy paper onSocial Developmentcontains a condemnation of “conversion therapy” for minors. Should these differences be ascribed to the shifting cultural mores of their moments, or to the shifting priorities of the DA under different leaders, or both?
It is difficult to say. It should be noted that there are a number of policy areas on which the DA has remained entirely consistent over the past decade. One is the protection of private property rights; another is the necessity of social grants.
What has changed, however, is the tone in which they are discussed. The 2014 election manifesto under Helen Zille congratulates Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki for the progress made to provide “a safety net for vulnerable citizens through social grants” — the acknowledgement of the progress made by previous ANC presidents itself reflective of far more conciliatory, far less combative language in the manifesto as a whole than the DA uses today.
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