New face of South Africa's opposition

Pity the politician who takes on South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), a party of liberation heroes like Nelson Mandela and sophisticated technocrats like President Thabo Mbeki.

In the 13 years since the end of apartheid, the ANC has not so much dominated the political scene as swallowed it whole. In the 2004 national elections, the ANC and its coalition partners won nearly 70 percent of the vote.

Enter Helen Zille, a liberal, white former journalist, mother of two, mayor of the gorgeous city of Cape Town, and now head of the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA is the closest thing South Africa has to an opposition party, with 12.7 percent of the vote in the 2004 election.

Ms. Zille was chosen this month to succeed the combative Tony Leon, who headed the party for 14 years, but failed to win over many black voters. Black South Africans, who make up more than 80 percent of the population, overwhelmingly support the ANC.

The challenge will be for Zille's DA to do what the country's previous white-led parties haven't done, and that is to reach out to all South Africans, regardless of race. "What we need to do is show that we care about everybody, we demonstrate that it's not just the people of the same color that we care about deeply," said Zille in a recent phone interview from Cape Town. "We have the will to do that, and the ANC doesn't."

Even with a track record of improved services in Cape Town, and a fierce anticorruption ethos that earned her the nickname "Godzille," she knows she faces an uphill task.

"It's not going to be easy, I can be tarred and feathered with race," she says. But in a way, her job is really quite simple, she says. "It's defined by the Constitution: We provide basic services. I'm pro-economic growth, and so my policy allies with the unemployed," by creating new jobs.

Uniting a fractured opposition

In a way, Zille's greatest challenge will not be the almighty ANC, but keeping the fractious DA – a mixture of liberal, moderate, and deeply conservative whites, mixed-race "Coloureds" and Asians, and a scattering of black voters who are put off by the ANC's socialist ideology – together. At party conferences these various groups clash as much with each other as they do with the ANC at election time.

The difficulty, many political observers say, is to find a positive message that will unite this base, while reaching out to other South Africans who are starting to see the ANC's failure to live up to its promise.

"South African politics are not just about race, they are about identity, and thus everyone identifies with the ANC," says Tim Hughes, a senior researcher at the South African Institute for International Affairs in Cape Town. Demographics, with nearly 80 percent of South Africans voting along racial lines for the ANC, mean that time is working against the DA in the long run. "That means the Democratic Alliance is not going anywhere except backwards."

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