Coping with the success - local empowerment in Democratic Alliance

The project is a continuation of a well-established and mutually benefitting partnership between DLDP/Venstre and the second biggest party in South Africa, Democratic Alliance. The two parties have a lot in common. They are both members of Liberal International. They take respon-sibility in local government – alone or in coalitions. And most recently both parties have entered into national coalitions which were quite unthinkable a few years ago. The potential for mutual learning is very big and will be explored even further in the coming years.

Since 2018, the DA and DLDP has been working together under the headline Ready to govern locally. The partnership has among other things focused on local policy development and coalition management. These issues will still be on the agenda, but the DA is now in a situation where they risk suffering from their success. If just parts of the very optimistic forecast for the upcoming local elections becomes reality, the DA will end up governing in a big number of new municipalities.

Until now, the DA has had a rather centralised approached to policy development and to assistance to local governments. That approach could be justified in a tense political environment with very fragile coalitions. But in the long run it is not sustainable in huge country with many new local DA governments. Consequently, the partners have developed a project that shall rescue the DA from drowning in its own success. That will mainly be done in two ways. Firstly, the capacity of the DA in one of the provinces will be developed considerably, so the support to local governments does not have come from HQs thousands of kilometres away. Secondly, the new project aims at strengthening the local branches of the party – something which has not been a priority in recent years.

DLDP is in frequent contact with the Danish embassy in Pretoria. Until now, no other Danish parties are engaged in South Africa.