Steenhuisen blames inconsistency for DA’s poor showing
THE DA underperformed during last year’s general elections because it tried to please too many people, but ended up having a strategy that did not resonate with people, said its interim leader John Steenhuisen during his visit to Pietermaritzburg yesterday.
He said he was confident that after next year’s local government elections, the DA would govern a number of municipalities, including eThekwini and Msunduzi, through coalitions because he would change the campaign strategy.
Steenhuisen said if elected as the leader during next month’s national elective conference, the party would not allow policy inconsistency to persist.
He commended a panel made up of former DA leader Tony Leon, former DA chief executive Ryan Coetzee and Michiel le Roux, founder of Capitec Bank, for coming up with a report that revealed the weakness that cost the DA many votes last year.
“I think that the panel has done an excellent diagnosis of where we went wrong, and what we did was try to be too many things to too many people, but ended up being nothing to anybody,” he said.
It was believed that last year’s election result and the panel report were the reasons former leader Mmusi Maimane had to resign from the party.
The initial aim of visiting KwaZulu-Natal’s capital city was to campaign for the Ward 25 by-election to be held on March 18.
Steenhuisen told elderly people at Woodgrove Retirement Village in Howick that unlike the DA, the EFF and Freedom Front Plus performed well because their positions were clear to everyone.
“They are on the extreme left and the extreme right of the South African spectrum, and both of those parties did one thing in common.
“They are both nationalist organisations, and have more in common than people think and when you look at their posters you know exactly what they were fighting for, and exactly what their message was,” he said.
He said the DA remained in the middle, and had “five different posters” whose messages confused most voters. “People looked at the DA and did not know what the DA was standing for,” he said.
He said with the local government elections approaching, the party should fight to be better than it was last year. “That requires ideological coherence as no organisation can exist without full ideological coherence.
This means that everybody in the party should be pulling in the same direction.”
He said that the DA had tried and failed to govern through coalitions in Joburg, Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay “because we tried to govern through other people’s values and principles”.