The DA achieves its goals in the 2009 general election

DA leader Helen Zille arrived in Cape Town late on Friday to a hero’s welcome, after 82-days of hard campaigning on the election trail. Addressing hundreds of fervent supporters who had braved the cold to meet her at the airport, she promised supporters that, as the new premier of the Western Cape she would serve the interests of all people in the province, where racial divides run deep.

"We will try to govern as well as we can to show that life is better for everybody under the DA," she said.

The DA is in a position to take sole control of the Western Cape government after winning an outright majority in the province with more than 51 percent of votes, the first time since 1994 that a party has scored an overall majority in the province.

Although the party does not need coalition partners in the provincial legislature, Zille hinted that she might still form an alliance with smaller parties.

Speaking last Sunday, DA CEO Ryan Coetzee released a detailed analysis of the party's performance, saying the DA had achieved all three of its key objectives:

"To keep the ANC below a two-thirds majority, to win an outright majority in the Western Cape, and to significantly strengthen our position as the official opposition in South Africa," he said.

He said the DA's growth of more than 1 million votes (1 014 628) nationally had seen it increase in size by about 35 percent.

Translating into 17 additional seats, this would see a total of 67 DA MPs on opposition benches in the 400-member National Assembly.

Newcomers include respected academic Wilmot James and the party's former parliamentary media officer, Lindiwe Mazibuko.

Coetzee added that it had never been inevitable that the party would do as well as it had and that many factors had underpinned the party's success, including Zille's ‘inspired leadership’, the repositioning of the party as one with the ability to win power off the ANC, and the efficiency of its campaign machinery.

However, the DA needed to garner more support among black South Africans and would be working to that end with renewed determination.

The DA's federal executive would meet this week to discuss plans for the local government elections in 2011, when it aimed to win cities and municipalities across the country to build a platform from which to launch a campaign for national government in 2014.