The Democratic Alliance (DA) has joined forces with smaller opposition parties in a pact known as the Multi-Party Agreement for South Africa to challenge the ruling ANC, which has been in power for 30 years.

Today’s rally took place as the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which has its stronghold in KwaZulu-Natal province, vowed to work with the DA.

Recent polls suggest that the ANC will lose its outright majority in the National Assembly, but the DA is also under pressure after its support declined in the last general election and several of its former leaders left to form new political movements that will contest the polls.

A total of 52 parties are registered to contest the national and provincial elections.

Thousands of DA supporters and senior leaders gathered in Benoni, east of Johannesburg, where the party’s blue flags and regalia decorated a small stadium in the city.

“Make no mistake. If DA voters stay home, or if they split their votes among the many small parties on the ballot paper, the next chapter of our country’s story could be even uglier,” party leader John Steenhuisen said.

“If we sit back and allow a coalition of the ANC, the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters] and the MK [uMkhonto weSizwe, the ANC’s former armed wing, which former president Jacob Zuma has given to his party], propped up by the sell-outs in the Patriotic Alliance [PA], then our tomorrow will be far, far worse than our yesterday. It will be doomsday for South Africa,” he said to loud applause.

A coalition between the DA and other parties, including the PA, in the City of Johannesburg following the 2021 local government elections collapsed shortly afterwards, handing power back to an ANC-led coalition, and there is bad blood between the two parties.

Steenhuisen has repeatedly accused the ANC and the radical left EFF of planning to form a coalition after the elections.

IFP leader Velenkosini Hlabisa said on Sunday that his party’s main goal was to remove the current government. “The IFP is campaigning to remove the ANC from power, to become part of government.”

“Vote for the IFP to remove the government that has failed,” Hlabisa said, listing unemployment, poverty, crime and the electricity crisis as some of the major problems facing South Africans.

“We all know the crisis we are facing, we all know the depth of the struggle in South Africa and the trauma that so many of our people are going through on a daily basis, what the country needs to hear is that there is a way out,” he said.

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