Voting in South Africa has increasingly little to do with race and much more to do with socio-economic status. The Democratic Alliance (DA) is not a white party but a middle-class party, and the extent to which its voters happen to be black or white is increasingly determined by the extent to which the middle class is black or white. And, as this newspaper has shown over recent weeks, the middle class is increasingly dominated by black people.

A recent report estimated the size of the middle class overall using data on mortgages, among other indicators. Another estimated its growth using vehicle sales data. A third showed that roughly two thirds of the local ownership of the stock market is now in black hands. A fourth used estimates of engineering graduates to show how the racial composition of the middle class has changed over the past 30 years (and how it will continue to do so). Later this week, this newspaper will release research showing that a majority of private medical aid beneficiaries are black.

If you want to see the wonderful, real-life, living and breathing manifestation of the above, attend a parkrun in Johannesburg. For those who are not aware of what these are, a parkrun is a free, weekly, community-organised 5km event held every Saturday morning in parks and other public spaces around the world. Participants can run, jog, walk, or volunteer, and people of all ages and fitness levels are welcome. Each participant registers once online to receive a personal barcode, which is scanned at the finish to record their time. Across South Africa these are the most heartening representations of the positive change South Africa has experienced since 1994 and what the whole country could be if its politicians got their act together.

It obvious therefore why Zille saw an advantage in the association. The juxtaposition of that is whether the African National Congress (ANC) leadership of the city could show up at such an event and be welcomed?

The answer is likely no.

When he first came to power, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s people famously had him jog down a beachfront in Cape Town, where excited members of the middle class stopped for selfies and basked in their then-still-naive assumption that his administration heralded positive change. It is therefore not as if the ANC is unfamiliar with what Zille sought.

Parkruns in Johannesburg have not been immune from the mismanagement of the city. Some have had to be redirected because of sewage flows or collapsed infrastructure that posed a physical danger to participants. Parkrunners are the nicest people, but the limits of their good nature would likely be tested were the city’s governing administration to show up in their ranks for a photo opportunity.

To the extent that that is true – it is a pretty brutal point for the ANC to have reached.

And yet the party is still pressing to nationalise private healthcare services, which amounts to a direct attack on one of the most valued assets the black middle class has come to possess. Its expropriation policies, given that these extend to seizing all fixed and movable assets without compensation, are another direct attack on that group. Its general approach to probity and ethics is again a direct attack on the tax paid by middle-class people. Undermining parental control over schools, as is the policy of the ANC, albeit now being executed on its behalf by the hapless DA education minister, is the same thing again.

It is as if the ANC continues to dwell in the world well before 1994 and cannot bring itself to understand that the country has changed, and, in terms of middle-class growth and expansion, very much for the better. And that clinging to its old ideological tropes now places it at odds with the people – whom it once called, with some justification, “our people”.

Its mistake is compounded by the fact that the middle class must not be understood only as the roughly 15% or so of people who fall into the joint categories of being attached to households with private health insurance and mortgages. The middle class is much bigger than that when the aspirations of relatively poorer people on the urban peripheries are taken into account. The ANC’s attacks on the established middle classes therefore feed through into attacks on the aspirations of a much greater number of South Africans.

Even in very poor rural areas populated by older demographics, grandparents and others live vicariously through the hope that their children and grandchildren, who have gone to the cities, will find jobs and routes into the middle classes. The ANC’s attacks feed through all the way into those communities too, and this is a key reason the ANC now polls under 50% in all voter markets (including the black, rural, and poor markets).

That the party would likely be afraid to show up at a community run in a Johannesburg park opens a window into the living, breathing consequence of that drop in support to reveal just how far its compounding errors have led the ANC from the status it once commanded.