Fair comments, but I think that was the point I was broadly trying to make? In order to survive a coalition government intact, the DA needs to extract heavy concessions from the ANC, concessions that will be unpopular with ANC members and supporters and ones that it won’t want to make as it is still by far the largest party (and the only one that can claim, broadly, to be a truly ‘national party’). If the DA fails to do this and ends up being perceived as having ‘sold out’ the interests of its electorate, the barriers to entry for a new party representing ‘white interests’ (although I imagine it wouldn’t explicitly market itself as such) are very low, given proportional representation and the low threshold required to enter parliament.
After all, the DA owes its current formulation to very similar movements in the 1999 general election, when large numbers of white voters decamped to it from the National Party thanks to the latter’s lack of definition (were they going to be a collaborative coalition partner with the ANC; a representative of white and coloured interests in government; or an opposition party?) versus the then DP’s consistently critical stance of the government. Given the enormous gulf between the electorates of the DA and the ANC (and of course, the ANC will be looking to try and regain voters that it has lost to EFF and MK) and the visceral ill-feeling (to put it mildly) that exists between the two parties, coalition negotiations become a zero-sum game in which one side has to be seen to win at the expense of the other, which isn’t conducive to government formation.
This is all true, but I would make three points, as to why I still think it would be in the DA's best interests to go into this coalition -
As much as the DA and ANC do viscerally hate each other and have been constant opponents since 1994, the new factor is the emergence of the EFF and MK Party. As in, those two parties do absolutely terrify the DA's voters and the party being able to succesfully point out that it had kept Zuma and Malema away from power would win a lot of credit. For after, a point that has been made often in recent weeks is that the DA and ANC do share a strong attachment to the constitution and to procedure, which does tend to naturally incline them towards a degree of mutually shared interests against the onslaught of an actively anti-constitutional Zuma.
Adding to that, for all they are sensitive to ethnoracial appeals, I don't think the bulk of the DA's electorate are particularly ideologically liberal. For the most part, they aren't going to be overly concerned about ideological concessions on the minimum wage (or even abolishing BEE for that matter). Indeed, the fact that the crisis here is over cabinet positions rather than a policy agenda is testamant to that. In which case you are right about there being a perceived need to look as if they are winning rather than winning, but is also just a degree of lacking the South African political system lacking in maturity overall when it comes to a coalition forming process. And what I would add to this, is that for the most part people would be very forgiving. If in five years from now, there were real perceived improvements in areas like public services, or the economy or unemployment then the DA would very concretely be able to present these as victories to their own constituency.
Finally, although the theoretical barriers to entry are low, we have just seen an election where a lot of money and attention was thrown as new alternative parties for an absolutely risible result. ActionSA, Rise and Build one Mmusi Maimane with Mmusi Maimane got, what 2% of the vote all together. Since the beginning of democracy, the only parties that have emerged to score anything more than marginal results have either been splis from the ANC, or the apartheid-era legacy continuum. As in, no-new movement has actually emerged to obtain any real relevance outside of ones targetting the very unique coloured electorate. That in itself is testament to how sticky loyalties actually are. Which doesn't mean none ever will, I would hope someone eventuall does, but for the moment no newcomes actually has broken in.
