Simmers confident DA has done work needed to retain Cape Town
Many predict the DA won’t be able to match its current majority in the city following steady declines since 2016 as new political players look to cement their position in council.
Lindsay Dentlinger
Tertuis Simmers. Picture: X/WesternCapeDA
X/WesternCapeDA
Democratic Alliance (DA) provincial leader Tertuis Simmers seems confident his party has done the work needed to retain control of the City of Cape Town, as well as several major municipalities in the Western Cape where it narrowly lost out in 2021.
Simmers said he observed the strong turnout of DA supporters in areas traditionally considered African National Congress (ANC) strongholds in the metro.
But many predict the DA won’t be able to match its current majority in the city following steady declines since 2016 as new political players look to cement their position in council.
“We will be waiting for results as they come in and then we will see if the pundits are wrong or right. What I’ve observed tells me that the voters heeded our call; they went out en masse to vote. We will wait for the final outcome.”
Although the Cape Town metro makes up almost 70% of the provincial voting bloc, it’s not just the metro the DA wants to retain.
The stakes are also high for the party’s provincial leadership to get a firmer grip on municipalities in the outlying areas of the Garden Route, the Overberg and the central Karoo.
“We are quite energised and excited for some of the results. The reality is some of these municipalities we might just miss out. We saw in Bitou in 2021 we missed out by 28 votes, in 2016 we missed out by 50 votes, so where the teams have missed out narrowly, they’ve really tried all they can over the last three days.”