By Nellie Peyton
JOHANNESBURG, April 12 (Reuters) – South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) elected Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis as its leader on Sunday, as the ruling coalition’s second-biggest party sought to capitalise on discontent to expand its power base in this year’s local polls.
The 39-year-old was widely considered the favourite to succeed Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, who has led the pro-business party since 2019 and is stepping down.
Hill-Lewis has given few details about his plans but is not expected to depart significantly from the policies of his predecessor, who took the DA into a coalition with the African National Congress (ANC) in 2024 while continuing to fight it on issues such as national health insurance and affirmative action, which the DA opposes.
Africa’s most industrialised country must hold local elections before November, and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ANC is expected to see its share of the vote slip again.
Local polls have traditionally gone worse for the ANC than the national vote, as voters furious at failures to deliver basic services like water and road repairs punish the party that has been in power since apartheid ended in 1994.
“Our mission is to build the DA into the biggest party in South Africa,” Hill-Lewis said on Saturday, ahead of the leadership vote at a party conference near Johannesburg.
The DA holds 22% of seats in the lower house of parliament, second to the ANC with 41%.
However, the DA is still seen by many as the party of white privilege, and it has not had a non-white leader since 2019. Some analysts see that as a limiting factor in a country that is more than 90% non-white.
“It would’ve been so much easier for them to appeal to a broader constituency if there was a dynamic person … of another colour,” author and political scientist Susan Booysen said.
(Reporting by Nellie Peyton; Additional reporting by Lulah Mapiye;Editing by Tim Cocks and Keith Weir)
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