Hermann Pretorius
Hermann Pretorius studied law and opera before entering politics and, latterly, joining the IRR as an analyst. He is presently the IRR’s Head of Strategic Communications. He describes himself as a Protestant, landless, Anglophilic, Afrikaans classical liberal. Pretorius is the author of Rule Breakers: How the 2024 Election Campaign Changed South Africa Forever (Protea, 2025).
Articles By This Author
Joburg race a test of Zille’s fighting brand
Helen Zille’s effort to get elected as the city’s mayor has reached the point where the election is becoming less a contest of diagnosis than
Hill-Lewis shows his hand
Geordin Hill-Lewis’s reshuffle of the DA’s GNU team is the clearest sign yet that he understands an uncomfortable truth about party leadership: government appointments are valuable instruments of political party management.
The problem is your “antidote” race laws, Mr Van der Rheede
Christo van der Rheede’s latest somewhat vituperative response to me – republished by the Daily Friend yesterday– is revealing. Instead of answering the central question, he accuses me of caricature, polemic, “ideological compression”, and fabricating the FW de Klerk Foundation’s position. That is a convenient move, but I am afraid it will simply not do.
When is non-racialism not non-racialism? When it is carried out by methods of constitutional vandalism
Over the past few weeks, an important public debate has unfolded between myself and Christo van der Rheede of the FW de Klerk Foundation over one of the defining constitutional questions of post-apartheid South Africa: does the Constitution require or even allow race-based redress?
Why Zille’s Johannesburg stunts are more serious than they look
An election campaign is often described in the grand language of strategy, messaging, and ground operations. But in reality, this vocabulary, for all its value as a tool of practice and analysis, can actually be boiled down to two simpler and more unforgiving essentials: being able to win attention, and making promises people believe.
Till they’re blue in the face: the DA’s underperformance problem
The Social Research Foundation (SRF) recently published, in The Common Sense, a national opinion poll placing the DA on 28% national support, the poll having a 2-point margin of error. Internal DA numbers paint a similar picture of the party in the high 20s.
Poll position: How the DA managed to beat the ANC — but is at risk of losing it all again
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.
Loud commentary, quiet voters: the DA that Steenhuisen leaves behind
One of the most persistent analytical mistakes in South African politics is the failure to distinguish between noise and public opinion. The two are repeatedly
Race and redress: what the Constitution actually says
Rarely does public debate centre on the Founding Provisions of section 1 of the Constitution. This section has almost drifted into an ethereal category, treated
Why B-BBEE’s inherent elitism will always cause it to fail
“Broad-Based” Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) reduces being economically excluded to being black. Even if this unsupported and contentious position were true, B-BBEE would still be