If we are to envision change in our political landscape, we have to begin with the reality we have. The current reality is that only the Democratic Alliance (DA) has a solid organisational infrastructure — all other opposition parties are as good as dead. Apart from its bureaucratic finesse internally as well as in the provincial and municipal administrations it runs, the DA further distinguishes itself with a clear philosophical proposition of liberalism and the associated notion of an open opportunity society.

These values cast the DA as a champion of individual freedoms, equality and rule of law. Perversely, they also serve as morphine for its leaders against the terrifying reality of deep-seated socioeconomic inequalities that are deeply marked along racial lines. Still, the DA does not suffer from the ambiguities found in other opposition parties.

Despite having a clearly articulated set of views, the DA has its own credibility challenges that will undermine any effort to position itself as a governing party in the future. These constraints are not insurmountable. First, if the DA seriously wants to position itself as an alternative, it will need to overcome the perception that it is a party that panders to the core constituency largely made up of middle-aged white men that are in denial about the shadow of the past in our social structure today.

This constituency is almost exclusively driven by fear and finds it hard to accept that it is not just the poor record of the ruling party in the past 18 years that is responsible for our challenges, but it is also the failure to deal decisively with the Legacy of apartheid. It is this constituency that prevents the party from seizing the political middle ground.

One of the weaknesses of the current DA leader, Helen Zille, is her inability to use her political capital with the party’s core constituency to drive serious change in the party’s ideological and leadership makeup. As such, she has not sufficiently challenged this core constituency to buy into a new and well-defined compact for change in SA. Zille needs to stake her ground on an inclusive political vision and force the party’s traditionalist base to embrace it or leave the party.

Second, the party should reframe its philosophical position related to SA’s unique social challenges. This will require tempering liberalism with an emphasis on social redress. As such, the party will have to locate its ideological commitments in the political centre — championing the politics of liberalism, while offering a bold programme for tackling social inequalities. Its purist liberal commitments, devoid of a contextual social redress paradigm, have no currency in SA today.

Change in this regard would entail making compromises with a view to knitting a much broader political platform of shared and legitimate social purpose. Such a platform would create a basis to draw in various other opposition parties that broadly share an outlook of progressive change as the first step towards engaging with the broader society. This would allow for the reframing of the country’s politics beyond the binary tension constructed along the African nationalist liberationist paradigm associated with the ANC on the one hand and the liberal and postracial myth associated with the DA on the other.

Third, the DA will have to engage with the question of race honestly. This should not necessarily be on terms defined by the ruling party or liberationist politics, but through creating a culture of candour within the DA to make it much easier to talk about race and its complexities in post-apartheid SA. The reality is that we are still a long way away from building healthy social relations in society and overcoming the barriers constructed over many decades by the apartheid system.

The DA is well positioned, given its growing demographic diversity, to provide a nexus for such a debate.

Finally, the party will need to rebrand itself, with a strong focus on presenting itself as an inclusive party of the future.

This will be especially important if the DA sees itself as a nucleus for reconfiguring opposition politics and seeks to draw other parties into a new opposition compact.

A name change will be a powerful symbolic gesture of its commitment towards the building of a new politics.

A failure to reconstruct opposition politics on these terms could deepen the void created by the ANC’s leadership deficiencies and lend traction to a populist and extremely nationalist party. Eventually, political change in SA will happen with or without the DA. It has a choice.

This article appeared in the Business Day of 2 November 2012