It’s official: Steenhuisen announces he will contest DA leadership

Democratic Alliance (DA) parliamentary leader John Steenhuisen announced that he would be officially stepping into the race to become the new leader of the party, following Mmusi Maimane’s dramatic resignation on Wednesday last week.

Announcing his candidacy at the Cape Town Press Club, just as the party’s federal council chairperson Helen Zille did in 2007 before she became leader of the party, Steenhuisen was met with applause after saying he would “avail himself” as party leader.

In his speech at the club, Steenhuisen said the DA would survive its recent upheavals.

“People have left, people are gone, the cause endured, nothing has changed,” he said.

He jokingly said he looked forward to “pointing out the yellow lines from time to time” to Zille, who said she would “stay in her lane” following her victory in the race to become federal council chair, which saw her beat her closest rival Athol Trollip by just seven votes. Trollip resigned as the party’s federal chairperson last Wednesday alongside Maimane.

In an interview on eNCA over the weekend following Steenhuisen’s election unopposed as the DA’s new parliamentary leader, the former chief whip was coy about whether or not he’d run for the DA leadership, though he did say there was a “good possibility” he would throw his “hat in the ring” for the position once prodded.

Prior to this, he said his priority for now was focusing on the DA’s role in the National Assembly, ahead of a week that would include Finance Minister Tito Mboweni’s medium-term budget speech and a question-and-answer session with President Cyril Ramaphosa.

“I have not been shy of the fact that there is a good possibility I will put my hat in the ring,” he conceded.

He added he would need to consult with the party’s structures, his family and his colleagues before making such a decision, adding that ultimately it was a “decision for the federal council to make”.

READ MORE: Steenhuisen ‘a chameleon who betrayed Maimane’, says analyst

Steenhuisen said he hoped the direction of the DA moving forward would be to avoid “pandering to the radical left or radical right”, and take a position as a “strong opposition party at the centre of politics”.

He added that he wanted to grow the DA’s support “not just by slagging off the ANC but putting a compelling alternative offer on the table and hopefully winning the hearts and minds of more South Africans”.

Asked if he felt the recent resignations of Maimane and Mashaba made it seem like the DA was a party mostly for whites, Steenhuisen pointed to the fact that there had been “more resignations from white leaders” in the party.

“I’m not going to sit here and say all is alright,” he admitted.

“It has been a difficult week, we woke up without a leader and a chairperson but we woke up still with 85 seats in parliament, the second biggest party in South Africa. We are in government in a province and a municipality,” he said.

“We have a duty of care to the people who have put us into these positions to continue building the democratic project.

“Leaders come and go, personalities come and go but it is the values and principles of this party that have sustained it in its predecessors through much darker periods in our history.”

Asked if he wanted former head of policy Gwen Ngwenya to return to the party, he said: “I would like to see all those people who lost faith with the DA in the last election return to the party whether they be supporters or members or public representatives.”

He added he also hoped to attract support from “hundreds of thousands of South Africans who have given up on politics”.

(Compiled by Daniel Friedman.) 

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