Opposition political parties in South Africa are on a long march to dent ANC majorities. Although the parties take part in the uphill slog to close the gap, the succession of new parties falling in battle against the ANC hangs over their heads. And even ‘great opposition performances’ are only modestly reducing the ANC's lead.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has grown more steadfastly than any other opposition party in democratic South Africa. It grew by six percentage points from 2009 to 2014, while the ANC shrank by four percentage points. In the decade from 2004 to 2014 it grew incrementally and systematically from one national election to the next without setbacks, and this was despite new opposition parties detracting from its potential performance. Despite such achievements, however, the DA's growth has been modest and it has no guarantee that a new party may not still rise and eclipse it. The EFF made a notable 6 per cent entrance onto the electoral landscape in 2014, yet its performance was only marginally better than the six percentage-point growth that the DA registered.

Three futures need to be considered for the DA: on its own, incrementally growing as a predominantly liberal party (with or without added momentum that could allow catch-up with the ANC); becoming more like the ANC in policy and ideology (offering a cleaner, less corruption-prone party while extending rapidly into the black-African voter bloc); and largely suspending prior ideology to become a vote-catching party machine that would also align with other parties in governing coalitions.

The thread of these alternative futures runs through this argument. The DA as predominant opposition party anchors the chapter, counterbalanced with the rest of the opposition right of the ANC. The analysis places DA growth, identity changes and leadership dilemmas and change in the context of a weakened but always dominant ANC. The chapter dissects the DA's gradual accumulation of support, its strategies for reinventing itself, and its barriers to becoming the next government – and compares the DA's fortunes with the hopes of new opposition parties, which rise and fall at an approximate rate of one per major electoral event.

Positioning opposition amid ANC dominance

The DA – along with other centrist opposition parties – has encroached on ANC territory. In the process the DA cracked, but did not crush, the ceilings that racial and liberation identity impose on South African voter allegiances.