The decision of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) leaders in Midvaal, an Afrikaner-heavy constituency south of Gauteng, to take down a statue of Apartheid-era driving force and Prime Minister Hendrick Verwoerd reveals the party’s biggest dilemma. The DA is best qualified as a center-right party that stands in clear opposition to the African National Congress (and is, for the time being, the official opposition).
It is also, to be blunt, an overwhelmingly white party that while able to pick off Coloured constituencies in the Western Cape and elsewhere has a limited potential constituency that has probably already peaked. The DA will never seriously challenge the dominance of the ANC and at some point its limitations will likely cause it to slip from the first tier of the second tier of South African political parties. The Congress of the People (COPE) may never get its act together to supplant the DA, but some party, whether existing or still to be formed (my money is still on a breakaway coalition of the trade unions and communists as a challenge from the ANC’s left still seems far more viable than a challenge from the right.)
But the DA is also not just the National Party (or New National Party) in centrist clothing. The party has a balancing act to maintain — the only way to keep the tent as big as possible it needs to draw the support of as many whites as possible. But the DA also tries to present itself a cosmopolitan body capable of governing in the New South Africa. The DA, in short, is happy to have the verkrampte vote. It just does not want to explicitly appeal to that constituency for fear of marginalizing itself.
Thus the decision to take down the Verwoerd statue embodied the dilemmas of the Democratic Alliance. Taking down the statue seems an act of expediency, albeit perhaps not an especially reluctant one. But the Midvaal leaders did not make a show of taking down the statue and indeed are alleged by the right-wing Freedom Front-Plus to have done so under cover of darkness. Taking down the statue hardly represents an act of courage one way or the other in part because the party simply cannot afford acts of courage beyond the courage that it takes to try to appeal to the largest anti-ANC constituency possible.
