Federal Council chairperson Helen Zille says she believes that it’s possible for the Democratic Alliance (DA) to be the biggest political party after next year’s general election.
She however conceded that she’d been in politics long enough to know that one party’s loss of membership is not an automatic gain for her party.
She was responding to statistics being bandied about regarding the decline of the governing African National Congress (ANC). Zille was speaking at the end of the first day of the Democratic Alliance’s Federal Congress, where she’s running unopposed-to retain her position.
Voting for the new party leader will resume tomorrow. Delegates will choose between current leader and MP John Steenhuisen and former Johannesburg Mayor Dr Mpho Phalatse.
Zille says she knows better than being overconfident.
“I’ve been in politics too long to be overconfident and I know that a week is a very long time in politics and a whole year to go to an election is an eternity. So, I believe the DA will do well in this election, I believe the ANC will fall under 50 percent, I also know that on a good day in our polling, the DA is only 12 percentage points behind the ANC and we’ve never been that close before. It means that if we can consolidate the opposition vote behind the DA, it’s absolutely possible for the ANC to become the second biggest party in South Africa and the DA to be the biggest.”
Zille speaks to Iman Rappetti:
