A year ago, in April and May 2025, South Africa experienced one of the rarest moments in its democratic politics: a clean, head-on contest between the ANC and the DA over a single, concrete issue that touched every household. That issue was the cost of living.
The trigger was the proposed VAT increase in the 2025 Budget. Treasury, under pressure from the ANC in cabinet, sought to raise VAT in two steps to plug a widening fiscal gap primarily caused by the massive wage bill the South African state has dragged along to pacify the union members in the ANC’s Tripartite Alliance. The DA opposed the VAT hikes absent other pro-growth policy reforms, framing it not as a technical revenue measure, but as a direct assault on already strained households. The disagreement between the two largest members of the Government of National Unity escalated into a full-blown political confrontation. It played out with unprecedented drama in Parliament, in the courts, and across the public domain. So intense was this political clash that it destabilised the Government of National Unity and ultimately forced an historic and dramatic reversal of the proposed tax increases.
Yet, the most important consequence of that clash was not fiscal. It was political.
At precisely the moment when the VAT debate reached peak intensity, late March into April 2025, the IRR’s national polling captured something unprecedented. For the first time ever, the DA edged ahead of the ANC, registering 30.3% to the ANC’s 29.7%. Where only months prior the DA had been stable at 22% and the ANC at 41%, almost a precise freeze of the May 2024 election result, the DA gained 8 percentage points, and the ANC lost more than 10. This was movement well beyond margin of error, meaning it was not statistical noise. It was an upheaval of what had long been the underlying structure of South African politics. Even more striking was what sat beneath that headline 30%-30% tie: the DA’s support among black voters surged from around 5% in September/October 2024 to 18% in April/May 2025.
The DA was breaking into voter blocs long considered out of its natural reach.
A year later, as the political landscape of South Africa starts trembling in preparation for another election, this time to elect local governments, this historic moment of DA-ANC parity in national support deserves to be understood properly. It was not the product of a long-term realignment or a gradual ideological shift. Nor was it some fluke of highly successful pandering. Instead, it was the result of a sudden and notable narrowing of the political battlefield. For a brief period, South African politics stopped being about the lazier assumptions of identity and grievance, and became about material circumstances and the basic survival of South African households. Voters were not being asked to divide into political camps based on who they were. They were being implicitly asked, through the division in cabinet and Parliament, to align themselves with the political forces making their lives more expensive, and those who were trying to stop it.
The DA, by taking a firm, intelligible position against the VAT increase, aligned itself with that pressure. So too did the EFF and MK. All three these parties saw their support levels rise amidst the VAT showdown. The ANC, joined in defending the increase by the IFP and the PA, found itself on the wrong side. And because the issue was so immediate, so widely felt, and so easy to understand, the usual buffers of identity and loyalty were superseded. The parties favouring a VAT increase saw their support drop.
As the IRR noted in its polling report at the time, this was a moment in which politics moved, even if briefly, “beyond identity… to bread-and-butter issues.”
The critical mistake looking back to that showdown and ahead to the coming elections, would be to treat that moment as an anomaly. It was not. It was a glimpse of an alternative political equilibrium: one in which the dominant question is not racial redistribution, but economic pressure. It was a moment when voters were offered a new and highly unusual and utterly clear binary choice about their immediate material circumstances.
What has happened since that aberrational political moment a year ago has been just as revealing about the forces that shape public opinion and political support. As the VAT debate receded, so too did the political clarity it forced South Africa’s parliamentary parties into. The political conversation moved on from the VAT binary, broadened, lost its sharp edge, and drifted somewhat untethered away from the urgency of household budgets making it from one month to the next. In this muddle of messaging, the centre of political gravity drifted back towards its default settings. The ANC, no longer pinned to a single, unpopular economic position of genuine consequences for every single South African, was able to, in time, find itself luckily in more familiar territory. Recent polling numbers reflect this drifting reversion: the ANC back in the mid to high 30s, the DA again roughly ten points behind in the mid to high 20s.
The ANC below 40% nationally and the DA above 25% shouldn’t be misconstrued as a total return to the reality of a dominant ANC. That yacht has sailed. Yet, the difference between a tie and a ten point gap is of vital political importance – especially in terms of political momentum and morale.
The wave of the VAT debate crested. The high dipped. The breakthrough of a DA-ANC battle for largest-party in the country closed because the frame of the momentary clarity of contest dissolved.
This is the central strategic lesson for the DA as it prepares to elect new leadership and enter new and possibly paradigm-shifting electoral cycles. The political binary of the 2025 VAT moment worked in the DA’s favour not because VAT as an issue is necessarily uniquely potent, but because it forced political parties into a posture of discipline on an issue that affected South Africans yet has commanded almost no political contestation for decades. It is also important to appreciate that the DA’s benefit from the VAT debate was not the design of political strategy. There was no plan I have been able to discover to manufacture the moment. The moment presented an issue of such cut through that the public and the rhythm of government brought the budget to the fore as the most important political binary in South Africa since the 1992 referendum.
This confluence of circumstances brutally imposed onto the political debate a single, dominant point of argument that was rooted in lived experience. Two sides formed on an issue of intimate importance to all South African households. And parties needed to make a choice as voters looked on in unusual earnest. It created a situation in which the DA could present itself as aligned with the everyday pressures facing voters, while the ANC was forced into a defensive and intensely unpopular posture. The ANC should bless its lucky stars and thank whatever spirits haunt Luthuli House that the binary heat of the VAT moment has cooled in time for another election battle.
The task now facing the DA, if it wants to recapture the lightning of the VAT moment, is not to cynically recreate VAT as an issue. The public will see it coming. And the DA has never been good at pandering. But, for the DA to learn politically from the boost it gained and lost, it must appreciate and recreate the discipline foisted onto it by the VAT binary and ruthlessly internalise it as a permanent feature of DA politics.
This requires the party to organise its message around the surprisingly narrow pressures that define daily life in South Africa. These pressures are not obscure. They have been polled and identified by the IRR for years, are experientially widely shared by South Africans, constantly felt, and has gone politically underexploited when not framed properly. These pain-point pressures can be captured, with clarity and force, in three straightforward areas: jobs, justice, and lower prices. Shaping messaging around these three pillars is the DA’s best shot at sustainably weaponising the bread-and-butter binary the VAT debate represented.
Jobs has consistently polled as the top priority for South Africans. Having one of the worst unemployment rates in the world, the DA must address the central failure of the South African economy: exclusion from work. It is the issue that underpins almost every other social and economic problem. The party that owns, through communications focus at volume over time, the jobs issue speaks directly to the largest pool of frustration in the country.
The second part of the tricolon, justice, speaks to the breakdown of order and even societal equality. The Madlanga Commission has once again shown how crime, corruption, and impunity are not abstract concerns, but directly linked to the lived experience of ordinary people. One system of rules for those in power, especially illegally, and another for those who play by the rules. Those who have shown themselves adept at manipulating and evading justice in South Africa carry themselves with an arrogance and opulence that cast into inexpressibly tortured relief the suffering of the millions languishing in poverty and desperation. The party that can incorporate into its core messaging the example set by Glynnis Breytenbach in her forensic committee work, will earn the public’s trust on this issue that has becomes drenched in hopeless cynicism.
Lower prices as an issue speaks to the most immediate pressure of all: the cost of living. It is the space VAT briefly occupied and showed its potency. It is the supermarket, the electricity bill, the taxi fare. It is where policy failure is felt most directly and most personally. It is the decreasing capacity of a grant, the stagnation of wages, the creep of toxic inflation, and the dark spiral that becomes increasingly oppressive as the years stretch, and ultimately snap, the ligament of and the bonds of family and society.
These three categories of pain, jobs, justice, and lower prices, are not merely policy domains for which parties ought to have things written on papers that get published when the mundane political cycle requires it. They are the foundations of a political messaging framework that can once again force the bread-and-butter clarity that cuts across race and identity.
That is precisely the dynamic identified in the IRR’s May 2025 polling analysis:
“If the DA… aligns itself convincingly with these pro-growth priorities, the current moment would represent a lasting realignment. Conversely, if racial redistribution reasserts itself as the central framing… the ANC could yet regain lost ground… South Africa’s political future depends significantly on whether economic growth or racial redistribution defines the terms of… contest.”
The evidence since then suggests that the warning in that passage is already playing out. As the bread-and-butter frame flashed into being by the VAT debate has weakened, identity-based grievance has slunk instinctively back. Of course, this has not been helped by the blossoming attention of orange petals of identity and grievance in Washington. But neither has it been deliberately and determinedly countered by messaging and faith in the judgement of ordinary people. Accompanying this, we have seen the ANC’s recovery of standing, now again touching on the 40% mark.
The implication of this reality is stark, especially for the DA. It cannot afford to fight the next elections, local in 2026/7 and national in 2029, on terrain defined by identity grievances. It will lose that contest more often than it wins it, regardless of its organisational strength or leadership quality. It must instead force the contest back onto the simple material realities that briefly reshaped the political landscape in April-May 2025.
This requires a level of discipline that goes beyond normal campaigning. It means identifying the core pain points and refusing to be distracted from them. It means building maximum credibility on diagnosis and remedy. It means becoming the party that not only speaks most clearly about jobs, justice, and prices, but is most trusted on them from the actions in government and opposition. It means substantive repetition, public consistency, and a willingness to narrow rather than expand the message.
A leadership change may inject new energy and focus into a party. But leadership without a durable frame of political focus and policy promise produces at best temporary movement. The VAT moment itself proved that momentum can be created quickly. What the year since has proven is that it can dissipate if it is not anchored.
The message of “jobs, justice, and lower prices” offers a way to anchor it.
It is not a slogan in the superficial sense. It is a slogan in the sense that makes slogans worth something: a structure and a way of forcing politics to revolve around the pressures that allow most tangibly the path to an enlarged electoral coalition. It is a way of ensuring that the next time the DA reaches parity with the ANC, it does not do so briefly, but sustainably.
The VAT debate showed what happens when politics is distilled to what matters most. The DA’s challenge now is whether it has the self-control to commit to this. Not just as elections loom. But as part of the conversations held at branch meetings, baked into the policies proposed or challenged in town and city halls, the provincial legislatures, Parliament, and cabinet.
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