De Zille: a marriage of inconvenience

It is probably mean to be disparaging about the chances of newlyweds staying together long after the honeymoon bliss has worn off. Yet the latest local political marriage, that of the Democratic Alliance and the Independent Democrats, faces massive challenges.

The ID leader, Patricia de Lille, feisty as ever, anticipated scepticism from unnamed "self-appointed analysts" about the prospects of her love affair with the DA leader, Helen Zille, lasting. Tellingly, however, she failed to set out the reasons for this scepticism. Furthermore, she gave no reason for these challenges being a mere figment of analysts' imaginations or, if they are genuine, why they will not prove to be a barrier to marital longevity. It is worth looking at each of these challenges in turn.

The ID captured only 0,92% of the national vote last year. When combined with the DA's 16,66%, the two parties jointly excited 17.58% of all South Africans who cast a vote. These numbers speak for themselves. The ID does not bring many voters to the DA table. De Lille is not a massive vote-pulling political ­magnet despite her penchant for bright orange.So, if the cold facts offer cold comfort to these newlyweds, where else might well-wishers look to sustain the proposition and hope that the synergies of the merger will defy recent electoral history?

Some argue that the DA will become more attractive to black and coloured voters because of De Lille's presence in this party. The thinking here is that De Lille will add much-needed colour to the leadership structure and this, in turn, will be rewarded by voters at the ballot box.

This line of analysis is as unconvincing as it is crude. Although many South Africans rightly admire De Lille as one of the best MPs we have had since the advent of democracy, the DA brand is much stronger than that of De Lille. The DA remains the party of Tony Leon and now Madam Zille, the party that offered disillusioned South Africans, mostly whites, a "fight back" motif. One swallow, in the form of De Lille, does not a summer make. Change requires much more. It requires an ideological and tonal shift that was not even hinted at this past week. In the absence of such a shift, the merger with the ID will yield small to zero returns.

Furthermore, racialism in South African politics remains a big deal. The DA handles this fact clumsily. Right or wrong, the black African majority is more likely to react favourably to a Bantu Holomisa occupying a senior position within the DA than a maverick coloured politician whom most of us view as a decent parliamentarian, but someone essentially belonging to the political battlefields of the Western and Northern Cape. The DA's recent failure to elect blacks into senior leadership positions at its federal congress cannot be undone by a merger with De Lille's ID.

Most importantly, however, there are ideological differences that cannot be wished away. Either the ID will forget about its roots in the Pan Africanist Congress or it will continue in that Africanist tradition. The latter position means a commitment to social justice that is crafted in a language and a set of policies that are unashamedly racial and based in a historical, materialist analysis of existing inequities. This means that the DA mantra of "an equal-opportunity society" should give De Lille's conscience a tough time. One cannot imagine the De Lille of old times agreeing to the DA's recent wish, for example, that its members classify themselves as "South African" on state documents rather than as individuals with particular racial identities. How else will we measure transformation?

These are not mere ideological differences. They entail differences in policy. It means, for example, that the earlier De Lille would be more likely to endorse quota benchmarks in various sectors of society, not as a bean-counting end in itself as the DA often implies with its scathing use of phrases such as "racial mobilisation", but rather as a means to achieving substantive equality by dealing with structural inequality in the racial terms in which such inequality was brought about in the first place.

It is pretty obvious then that an Africanist, historical approach to social justice founded in the ideological convictions of the earlier De Lille would not go down well in the debate chambers of the DA where former (New) National Party folks with ahistorical intuitions still wield influence. If De Lille does not forget her own past, it is difficult to see how the libertarian, colour-blind approach to social justice at the heart of DA thinking will not spoil her appetite for growing old with Zille.

One possibility is that De Lille might, somewhat prudently, under emphasise these differences. After all, the DA is essentially doing her a favour by rescuing her from a political party that almost certainly would have died in 2014. This pact is best seen as an unspoken promise to give De Lille a DA lease on political life in exchange for her putting up with core DA principles. The DA hopes to shed its white image in the process.

There is little wrong with that kind of politicking. Political leopards have a right to change their spots and ­voters will then indicate what they make of it all.But if it does turn out that the political philosophy of the DA remains unchanged, then this political marriage will not attract additional black voters. After all, it is the well-founded perception that the DA remains a middle-class party, which partly accounts for its failure to make major inroads into black communities across the country. So either De Lille will rattle the philosophical foundations of the DA (and thereby cause trouble that could lead to divorce papers eventually being served) or she will be living in false consciousness like a self-deceiving battered spouse (in which case political history will judge her to have become, in the end, something of a political prostitute). That would be a terrible fate for someone with an earlier career that brimmed with ­admirable, principled politics.

The real significance of this political pact, ultimately, is not that the opposition will, in general, become stronger. Rather, it is a confirmation that multiparty democracy is pretty much dead. We are headed, within the next few years, towards a two-party political system.

Sadly and ironically, however, the two dominant parties that will remain, the DA and the ANC, are cut from the same ideological cloth. The ANC is also a middle-class party. This truth is hidden behind the veil of ­alliance politics and a massive welfare budget that obscures the neoliberal economic structure dominating the policy landscape. All of that, however, requires another day's reflection.

In the final analysis, the fact that more parties might be subsumed under the DA banner, including the Congress of the People and the United Democratic Movement, is a less interesting development than appears at first glance. Only when a party that is truly based in principles and policies that speak to the material needs of the poor majority, as well as their conservative outlook on the social and moral universe, will we have reason to be excited about the ANC's hegemony being threatened. Until then, polygamous political marriages between opposition parties will remain but a curiosity for the news cycle of that week to get excited about.