Alec Russell, the Financial Times‘s Johannesburg correspondent, reviews the new 707-page, autobiography of Tony Leon, the former leader of South Africa’s “liberal” Democratic Alliance (“liberal” is not an entirely correct label for the DA; that’s more a relic of its ideological forerunners’ position relative to the National Party within a very limited white public discourse under Apartheid).
Leon’s lasting legacy, if you may have forgotten, was to took the counsel of his advisers and run on the now infamous “Fight Back” electoral platform in 1999 to increase his party’s size of the vote, until then about 2% of the vote. Some critics referred to it derisively as “Fight Black.”
Here’s Russell on that decision and its long-term effects for the DA:
