Zille’s dream target of 30% fades over time

ACCORDING to the Sunday Times-commissioned Ipsos poll of registered voters, national support for the Democratic Alliance stood at 23% three months before the May 7 election.

Unless there is a dramatic change in the next 45 days, the party will finish far off its once widely touted 30% target, a significant shortfall by its own high standards.

Tracking DA leader Helen Zille’s predictions over the past five years reveals a steady pattern of downgrading over time as the gulf between the DA’s actual support and its ambitions became increasingly apparent to her.

In February 2009, Zille declared: “By 2014 we’ll be part of national government.”

Behind the scenes, however, the party was more modest, if still ambitious: its federal council formally adopted a 30% na- tional vote target for 2014 soon after the April 2009 elections.

By May 2011, Zille had begun to publicly blur her time frames, ambiguously introducing 2019 to the equation: “We’ve already made plans for 2014 and 2019, when we’ll be in [national] government.”

Behind the scenes, the 30% target became the DA’s mantra.

In public, too, the 30% target became commonplace, with many high-profile DA leaders, including Zille, repeating it to the media.

“The DA aims to win 30% in the 2014 general election,” parliamentary leader Lindiwe Mazibuko told the party’s March 2012 KwaZulu-Natal congress.

Gauteng leader John Moodey and Western Cape leader Ivan Meyer made similar statements.

By May 2012, party communication to prospective donors stated that one of the DA’s “three overall objectives for 2014” was to “increase our national support to 30%” — the others being to win Gauteng and increase the party’s ma- jority in the Western Cape.

In June last year, Zille was still using the 30% target, but this time to a more remote audience — the DA’s London branch — away from the local media spotlight.

By October, six months from the election, she had become more cautious still and, in a briefing to the South African Institute of Race Relations, said: “It is misleading to compare local government elections with national elections.

“2014 is a national-provincial election, and we must compare our targets against the benchmark set in the 2009 national-provincial general election, when the DA won 16.6% of the vote.”

The DA won 24% of the vote in the 2011 local government elections.

The 30% dream was brought to an abrupt and complete halt by Zille last month when she tweeted on February 20: “Just to make it very clear: our target is NOT 30% of the vote.”

The party was now making “no predictions”, she tweeted later, on the grounds that “campaigns change things”.

In a subsequent Business Day interview that month, she said of the 30% target that it had been meant as an ambition rather than an accurate estimate of support and that she had asked members to stop using it.