Cape Town — The question that Black South African political scientists are now asking about John Steenhuisen is sharper than the one being asked by DA internal caucuses or party donors: not whether the DA leader can survive the pressure, but whether the Government of National Unity was a masterstroke of democratic preservation or the moment the DA fundamentally misread what its voters actually wanted.
"The DA's decision to enter the GNU reflected a certain elite consensus — civil society, business, liberal commentators — that a stable transition away from ANC dominance mattered more than maintaining a sharp opposition posture," said one Johannesburg-based political scientist specialising in South African party systems, who asked not to be named pending publication of her forthcoming research. "But that consensus was not uniformly shared by Black South African voters the DA was trying to attract, who may have wanted accountability delivered from outside the tent, not from within it."
That analytical tension sits at the centre of a BBC analysis that has traced how the tide has turned against Steenhuisen, tracking the arc from his positioning as a bold opposition voice before the May 2024 elections to his current role as co-governing partner of the very party the DA spent three decades defining itself against.
The calculation Steenhuisen made — that joining the GNU was preferable to a potential ANC-EFF alliance that could threaten constitutional governance — was widely praised at the time by civil society organisations that feared a more radical governing coalition. But coalition governance demands compromise, and compromise sits uneasily with a party built on holding the ANC to account. That tension is now fracturing the DA's relationship with several constituencies simultaneously.
Political analyst Ebrahim Fakir of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa has argued that the DA's GNU participation creates a legitimacy problem that runs in two directions: it satisfies neither its traditional base, which wanted opposition, nor its aspirant Black voter base, which wanted a party willing to challenge ANC governance structures rather than join them. The result, in Fakir's framing, is a party that is visibly everywhere in government but perceptibly absent as a site of accountability.
Steenhuisen's defenders within the party argue that DA cabinet presence has produced tangible policy constraints — pushback on National Health Insurance implementation timelines, resistance to elements of land reform legislation, and influence over the fiscal framework that would not have been available from the opposition benches. Whether those wins register with voters ahead of expected local government elections within the next two years remains the governing question.
The DA's demographic evolution complicates the internal arithmetic further. The party has made sustained efforts to broaden its base among Black and Coloured South Africans — efforts that have produced real, if modest, electoral gains in communities that historically regarded the DA as a white minority interest party. Those newer constituencies have different expectations of what GNU participation should deliver: they are less moved by the constitutional stability argument and more attuned to whether the DA is advocating visibly for economic transformation and service delivery on their terms. This is the internal fracture line: the tension between a traditional base that wanted the DA to be a check on the ANC, and a newer base that wanted the DA to be a vehicle for change from within.
The Joburg dimension adds another pressure point. Herman Mashaba's formal entry into the mayoral race — running in part on coalition fatigue, the same exhaustion with multi-party instability that is eroding confidence in the GNU model nationally — puts the DA on the defensive in a city it needs to be competitive in to claim national credibility. The two stories are pressure points on the same moment in South African coalition politics: both test whether the governing alliance that made sense at national level in 2024 can hold its logic at the municipal level in 2026.
In South Africa, as across post-conflict societies, the journey from apartheid to true equality requires generations — and constant vigilance. Whether Steenhuisen's GNU gamble ultimately registers as vision or miscalculation may depend less on internal DA politics and more on whether the Government of National Unity delivers something that residents in Johannesburg, Tshwane, and Ekurhuleni can actually see.
