Has the DA drifted to the right?

We were curious: has the DA really drifted rightwards over the last decade, as some observers claim?

First, some caveats.

Assessing the DA’s ideological positioning over time is not straightforward. For a start, no political party is entirely homogenous: individual members and representatives may hold different views on issues and articulate those in different ways, although they are still bound by the same core values and belief that the party is the best political vehicle to serve the country.

As such, in assessing the evidence, we focused as much as possible on election manifestos, policy papers and statements made in public by the party’s federal leader of the time — rather than utterances by individual MPs or spokespeople.

It is also important to note that the DA’s policies are not set by its leaders. A policy team drafts proposals, which are then voted on by delegates at the DA’s policy conferences. As such, to refer to “Zille’s policies” or “Maimane’s manifesto”, as we do here, is reductive but operates as shorthand for the leadership era in question — recognising also that a party’s political culture is influenced to at least some degree from the top.

Another aspect to acknowledge is that politicians respond to what is happening in real time, reflecting the culture of the moment, but also the events. Foreign policy has, in recent years, developed a much greater prominence in the DA’s messaging. That doesn’t automatically reflect a shift in the party’s priorities; it also simply reflects the extraordinary international events that have taken place during this period — such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and a more prominent role played by the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa in these events.

Mmusi Maimane’s leadership of the DA, between 2015 and 2019, arguably coincided with the cultural period future historians will record as Peak Woke, while the leadership of John Steenhuisen (2020-current) has taken place in a context of a concerted backlash against progressive values in many spaces globally.

This in itself might go some way towards explaining why the DA’s 2019 election manifesto, under Maimane, has a whole section on combating discrimination against LGBTIQ+ people. There is no mention of the LGBTIQ+ community in Steenhuisen’s main 2024 manifesto, though the current DA policy paper on Social Development contains a condemnation of “conversion therapy” for minors.

Should these differences be ascribed to the shifting cultural mores of their moments, or to the shifting priorities of the DA under different leaders, or both? It is difficult to say.

On some policies, the DA is unmoving

It should be noted that there are a number of policy areas on which the DA has remained entirely consistent over the past decade. One is the protection of private property rights; another is the necessity of social grants.

What has changed, however, is the tone in which they are discussed.

The 2014 election manifesto under Helen Zille congratulates Presidents Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki for the progress made to provide “a safety net for vulnerable citizens through social grants” — the acknowledgement of the progress made by previous ANC presidents itself reflective of far more conciliatory, far less combative language in the manifesto as a whole than the DA uses today.

Maimane’s 2019 manifesto contains a passionate defence of social grants as “an economic investment in poor and unemployed South Africans” serving to “unlock opportunities”.

By the 2024 manifesto under Steenhuisen’s leadership, grants are presented more as a necessary evil: “not an adequate substitute for a job” but “necessary for the economy because they protect the most vulnerable in society from extreme poverty”.

Whether this tonal shift in framing reflects a concession to more conservative voters who might be opposed to social welfare systems on principle, or is simply a logical response to a growing economic crisis and a growing dependence on social grants, can be debated.

Clear shift away from discussion of race or apartheid

More clear-cut, however, is the DA’s move away from race-conscious policies.

Though the DA’s position as “nonracial” has always been key to its DNA, the party under both Zille and Maimane was at pains to acknowledge the legacy of apartheid and the disadvantages this continued to create for black South Africans in particular.

Although a crude metric, Zille’s 2014 manifesto contains 12 mentions of the destructive legacy of apartheid, in addition to highlighting DA representatives who fought against apartheid and explicitly foregrounding prominent black DA representatives by name.

Steenhuisen’s 2024 manifesto mentions apartheid just once — to dismiss the ANC’s use of it as an excuse to explain the failures of the education system. Gone from that manifesto is any acknowledgement that economic and opportunity disparities exist between different races in South Africa.

“We need to remove race as a consideration in policy and legislation,” states that manifesto, reflecting the complete rejection of race-based redress that the party has adopted under Steenhuisen.

A similar drift rightwards is evident in the party’s position on labour issues and the state’s role in the economy over time.

“We are not free market fundamentalists,” said Zille in a 2009 address, referring to the DA government of the Western Cape.

Although union-sceptical, the DA under Zille affirmed “workers’ rights” in its 2014 manifesto. By 2019, under Maimane, this had been downgraded to workers’ “interests” — a small but revealing semantic shift. (Steenhuisen’s 2024 manifesto uses the term “rights” affirmatively in just two contexts: the protection of property rights, and the rights of learners superseding the rights of teachers.)

By 2019, under Maimane, there was a far harder push for labour market deregulation, with that year’s election manifesto calling for small businesses to be exempt from almost all employment legislation, proposing ways to make it easier to hire and fire workers, and ways to allow workers to opt out of minimum wage legislation — in other words, creating an incentive for people to work for less money.

This trend has intensified under Steenhuisen, with a lengthy section in the party’s economic policy paper devoted to how “harmful” South Africa’s minimum wage regulations are, although the party does not suggest scrapping them altogether. A proposed crackdown on the power of unions would include unions having to pay a deposit before going on strike.

An analysis of the policy documents also shows a shift in the DA’s thinking around the state’s role in the economy. Zille’s 2014 manifesto includes proposals for a DA national government to create “one million internships” for young people and seven million Expanded Public Works Programme work opportunities.

By 2024, Steenhuisen’s manifesto contains no proposals for the government to create or subsidise jobs. Instead, it pledges to “empower young people to break free from the constraints of the minimum wage”. The emphasis here is on small government, big business: removing as much regulation as possible from the markets to allow the private sector to create more jobs.

Guns, guns, guns

Perhaps the most overt policy shift aimed to appeal to more right-leaning voters, however, has been the party’s approach to gun control. This does not appear to have even registered as a policy issue for the DA during Zille and Maimane’s leadership, beyond exhortations to the state to crack down on illegal firearms.

From 2021 onwards, however, the party has taken an increasingly strident voice opposing gun control. This is for a specific circumstantial reason: the proposed adoption of the Firearms Control Amendment Bill, which the DA vehemently opposes. But by 2024, the issue had reached sufficient prominence in party priorities to make its way for the first time into an election manifesto, with that year’s manifesto declaring: “South Africans’ right to protect themselves and their families from violent crime must be defended”.

A rightward drift, not a lurch

The evidence points to an ideological drift rightward by the DA over the past decade, though the shift has been gradual rather than abrupt.

On some issues — particularly around race-conscious policies, labour market regulation and the state’s role in job creation — the movement has been consistent across successive leaderships, accelerating under Steenhuisen but visible even during Maimane’s tenure. The party has moved from explicitly acknowledging historical racial disadvantage and supporting broad-based BEE (Zille) to critiquing elite capture while maintaining some redress mechanisms (Maimane) to rejecting race-based policies entirely (Steenhuisen).

What remains ambiguous is whether these changes represent a genuine ideological transformation or strategic repositioning in response to electoral pressures, cultural shifts, and changing political circumstances. The DA's 2024 election performance — achieving 21.8% of the vote, slightly up from 20.8% in 2019 — suggests the rightward strategy has at least not damaged the party electorally, but the big question is whether it allows for significant future growth in a context beyond middle-class, predominantly white voters.

What is certain is that the DA of 2024 speaks a markedly different political language than the DA of 2014 — one less conciliatory toward the ANC’s legacy, less willing to acknowledge ongoing racial disparities, more suspicious of state intervention in the economy, and more aligned with conservative positions on issues like gun ownership.DM