Military historians have a term for what happens when armies start believing their own momentum. They call it “victory disease”.
The Japanese coined the term after Pearl Harbor, when a string of spectacular wins convinced Imperial commanders that they could keep pushing without adjusting their tactics or questioning their assumptions.
Six months later, at Midway, four of their aircraft carriers lay on the ocean floor. The admirals had not become less competent; they had stopped treating the enemy as dangerous.
The Democratic Alliance should pay attention. Recent polling from the IRR puts the ANC at 36%, while the DA has climbed to 27%. The party has just held its largest-ever Federal Congress, elected a new leader in Geordin Hill-Lewis, and set itself the target of becoming the largest party in the country’s metros by the 2026 local government elections.
Outgoing leader John Steenhuisen could point to real achievements: a seat at the cabinet table for the first time, the successful challenge to the VAT increase, and a ground operation that has been reaching voters across the country at a scale the party has never attempted before.
All of that is earned. But the DA now faces the kind of risks that come with momentum rather than weakness, and those are harder to see. Here are three that it should look out for.
Misjudging the competition
The ANC is losing ground, and its own annual report confirms the scale of the damage. Membership in good standing fell from 691,000 to 584,000 between August 2022 and December 2024, and only 1,357 of the party’s 4,417 branches were functioning by the end of that year (ANC 2024 Annual Report, the latest available). In Gauteng, the figure was 44 out of 529.
The report describes the party’s predicament as an “existential crisis” and notes that middle-class members and public-sector workers have withdrawn from party structures, “often as the fiercest critics of the ANC”.
More recently, former president Kgalema Motlanthe has warned that the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal is “effectively dying”. The party’s KZN elective conference has been postponed because more than 800 branches were not ready to participate, and partySecretary-General Fikile Mbalula himself has described the province as “a tsunami”.
Add a permanent cash crunch, with staff picketing Luthuli House over unpaid wages and the sheriff seizing furniture to settle debts in October last year, and what emerges is a portrait of an organisation that is struggling to hold itself together, let alone campaign.
But a weakened rival is still a rival. The ANC retains incumbency, patronage networks, a national footprint the DA cannot yet match, and the residual loyalty of millions of voters who still identify with its brand.
If the ANC finds the will to adopt pro-growth reforms and clean up its candidate lists, it could recover faster than the DA’s current confidence assumes. Weak is not the same as finished, and the DA should know the difference.
Losing what makes you different
As the DA broadens its appeal and absorbs supporters from other parties, it will need to accommodate a wider range of interests and expectations. That is normal for a growing party.
The danger is that the accommodation becomes so broad that the party’s commitments lose their shape. A liberal party that trims its liberalism to win a few more seats becomes indistinguishable from every other centrist formation promising competent management.
The DA’s value rests on standing for something specific: market-friendly policies, individual liberty, clean governance, and non-racialism. Voters who came to the DA because it was different will leave if it stops being different.
Governing like bureaucrats
The third risk is visible in the places the DA already runs. A party that campaigns on efficiency and limited government can, once in office, pick up the habits of the regulator rather than the reformer.
In Cape Town, the DA’s flagship city, ratepayers have watched municipal bills outstrip salary growth by a factor of four or five over the past decade. Property rate increases have drawn organised opposition from residents’ associations, which describe the new tariff structures as a disguised wealth tax on homeowners whose property values have risen on paper but whose incomes have not kept pace.
The city’s regulation of private solar installations requires a two-stage registration process, an ECSA-accredited engineer’s sign-off, and treats unregistered systems as criminal offences punishable by fines or disconnection. For a party that prides itself on enabling private enterprise, that is a lot of red tape wrapped around a citizen trying to generate electricity on their own roof.
Cape Town delivers better services than most South African metros. No one disputes that. But better-than-Joburg is a low bar for a party that says it believes in small government and economic freedom. The DA should be asking whether its own municipalities are living up to its own principles, not just outperforming the ANC’s failures.
The mirror
The DA’s most instructive case study is the party it hopes to replace. The ANC rode the greatest wave of political momentum in South African history. It translated liberation into landslide after landslide. But over three decades it stopped listening, stopped adapting and stopped earning the support it had come to take for granted.
Complacency, ideological rigidity, institutional bloat, the quiet assumption that voters had nowhere else to go: the DA can see every one of these pathologies in the ANC. It should check for early symptoms in itself.
Voters do not give permanent mandates. They lend them provisionally. The terms of that loan are performance, principle and humility, and the DA should not assume the repayment schedule is generous.
[Image: George Pisarevsky on Unsplash]
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