ANTHONY BUTLER | DA faces coalition challenge despite largest party hopes

Parties could back third-party candidate for president if it comes down to a power play

First published in Business Day

May 15, 2026

Newly elected Democratic Alliance (DA) federal leader Geordin Hill-Lewis made some striking remarks in his acceptance speech on 12 April. “The question”, he first asked, “is whether the DA can lead the country … Whether we can become the largest party in national government”. The new leader’s answer was a “resounding YES! Yes we can!”

He continued by setting out the “mission you have assigned to me: to grow the DA into the largest party in South Africa, and to lead a new national government.”

Reactions to the federal leader’s mission statement focused on the first element, with many commentators rightly observing that winning the biggest vote share will be a huge task.

Equally taxing, however, will be the second challenge with which Hill-Lewis conflates it: converting largest party status into the ultimate prize of leading national government.

After all, it is quite common in democracies for the largest party to find itself excluded from the governing coalition. Ideologically, it may sit at one end of a spectrum, allowing centrist and smaller parties to form alternative an “anyone but them” blocking coalition.

Smaller parties may prefer to coalesce together because doing avoids the condescension and disadvantage that befall a “junior partner”.

If the largest party rejects patronage politics, moreover, smaller resource-seeking parties that need to feed their impoverished activists and voters may simply decide to eat together.

Meanwhile we do not have a process for selecting a formateur – the person initially tasked with trying to form a government. This role is likely to fall by default to the state president elected within 14 days of the election outcome, and there is every chance that he or she will not be the leader of the largest party — especially if the largest party is the DA.

The formateur, as Cyril Ramaphosa has shown, gets to shape the initial proposal, the portfolio distribution, and the policy compromises that are on the table. This agenda-setting power matters because the first credible offer usually anchors subsequent negotiations.

A DA leader could perhaps assemble a “removal van” coalition forged primarily to eject the governing party rather than united round other shared commitments. The “moonshot pact”, the minefield of exploding egos through which John Steenhuisen picked his way, serves as a reminder of how dangerous such an enterprise can be.

Hill-Lewis’s speech suggests he has been tasked personally by his party with “leading a new national government”. He will, however, confront the most dismal question any ambitious but pinkish SA politician must ask. Can a white man like me really become state president?

Around the world, of course, party leaders quite often decide not to seek the premiership themselves and designate someone from their party who is more acceptable to potential coalition partners.

The most striking modern example is India in 2004. When a Congress Party-led coalition came to power, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly relinquished the prime ministership to Manmohan Singh. The official narrative centred on Gandhi’s “inner voice,” but the reality was more complex. Her Italian birth had become controversial and there were legal challenges being prepared against her eligibility. Singh was chosen precisely because he was a technocrat who could hold a fractious coalition together — he was respected, non-threatening to coalition partners, and lacking any independent power base.

The DA leader might likewise select a coalition-compatible presidential nominee while exercising real power himself behind the scenes. This Putinesque manoeuvre, of course, is also something an ailing African National Congress (ANC) is quite likely to attempt.

Finally, of course, there could always be an agreement among two equally matched parties, the DA and the ANC, to back a state president from a third party such as the Inkatha Freedom Party. President Velenkosini Hlabisa anyone?

Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town