By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Democratic Alliance (DA) leader John Steenhuisen has announced he will not contest the party’s next federal election, marking the end of his time as party leader.
Steenhuisen delivered a well-rehearsed speech at Riverside hotel in Durban, giving himself credit for leading the DA into a new era and announced that he wouldn’t be standing for re-election as party leader in April 2026.
Fullview yesterday reported that Steenhuisen wont stand for re-election ahead elective conference in April.
It was in 2019 when Steenhuisen rose through the ranks of the DA, after being appointed interim leader following Mmusi Maimane’s acrimonious resignation.
A year later, Steenhuisen was officially elected by the party’s Federal Congress to serve as its leader, winning against former MPL Mbali Ntuli with a commanding 80% lead.
The party’s 2023 federal congress saw Steenhuisen repeat that feat, thrashing former Johannesburg Mayor Mpho Phalatse.
Steenhuisen said he would stay on as agriculture minister to devote himself to ending the foot-and-mouth disease crisis.
At the end of his 20-minute oratory, Steenhuisen promptly left the building, leaving journalists, primed with questions.
Steenhuisen said it was a “mission accomplished” for him.
He left having delivered the “moonshot pact” that ushered in the Government of National Unity (GNU) and kept out the “Doomsday Coalition” (a potential alliance between the ANC, MK party and Economic Freedom Fighters).
He said that for decades the DA and its predecessors had fought to carry a vision of building an open, opportunity-driven society for all into the national government.
“It was only by gaining access to the levers of national power that we could ever hope to build a more prosperous, fair and successful country. But to actually get there, a leader was required who would do the hard work of converting the DA from a party of mere opposition, into a governing force strong enough to bend the arc of history.”
Steenhuisen said that since his election as party leader, he had helped transform the DA from “a perpetual opposition, smirking and pointing fingers while SA declined”.
After his re-election as leader in April 2023, with a mandate of 83% from Federal Congress delegates, Steenhuisen said he helped the DA form the moonshot pact, shedding its image of “shouting from the sidelines into a party that gets stuck in to fix the country we all love”.
The move to more collaborative politics sought to unite and isolate those keen on breaking the country. The GNU and the DA’s ascension to national power “constituted the single greatest achievement in the history of our party”.
The DA had since leveraged its influence to set SA on a fundamentally better path.
“SA today is a profoundly better country than it was on the eve of the 2024 general elections.”
Steenhuisen said the rest of his term of office would be focused on “defeating the most devastating foot-and-mouth disease outbreak our country has ever seen. That is not a part-time job.”
It wasn’t fair on farmers, he added, for him to split his time between battling the outbreak, while also running an internal campaign for the next three months and then leading a local government election campaign.
Under Steenhuisen, the DA agreed to join the African National Congress (ANC) as its biggest partner in the government of national unity nearly two years ago.
It was an historic moment for the country as the ANC, the party that brought in democratic rule in 1994 with Nelson Mandela and ended white-minority rule, had lost its parliamentary majority.