Goodbye to All That
This weekend the New National Party (it was renamed after the Nats pulled out of the Government of National Unity – GNU – in 1996) announced that it is folding its tent. In the 1994 elections F.W. DeKlerk’s party garnered a still-respectable 20% of the vote, firmly establishing themselves as an important player who would have a voice in the GNU. In the national elections held this April, the Nats managed to pull only 1.7% of the electorate even as Thabo Mbeki and the ANC drew a whopping 70%. Further, the NNP lost its grip on the Western Cape, the one province in which it continued to hold sway over the last decade. The party will continue to exist in name until next year’s elections, but for all intents and purposes, it ceased to be this weekend, even if it ceased to matter long ago.
The National Party held an iron grip over South African politics from 1948 into the early 1990s, outlawing the ANC (and the more radical Pan African Congress, PAC) from 1960 to Mandela’s release in 1990. Given that the only time the NP’s support ever dropped below 84% in the last three decades of its dominance, it is a bit shocking to visit South Africa these days and discover that apparently no whites actually supported Apartheid and the party that orchestrated it. Or perhaps it is simply a sign of progress that they are ashamed to admit as much. This is especially interesting when one notes that NP support only dipped below 84% when enough voters decided that the Nats were growing soft on matters racial, and that a breakaway faction, which came to be Transvaal NP leader Andrie Treurnicht’s Conservative Party, which criticized the NP from the right, better represented their interests. Treurnicht and his supporters left the party in February 1982 when P.W. Botha and the verligte (“enlightened”) wing of the NP attempted to initiate toothless, symbolic, reform in the guise of a “Tri-cameral parliament” that would give dubious voting rights and meaningless parliamentary representation to Indians and Coloureds but not to Africans in the early 1980s. (Neither house would have been able to outvote the white house of Parliament, thus making the representation in the Tri-cameral parliament all but worthless for nonwhites). Voters fled from the party in sufficient numbers to take the mantle of official opposition party from the liberal Progressives of Helen Suzman to the rabid Conservatives of Treurnicht, who took 17 seats in parliament.
In a sense, then, it is shocking that the National Party, in whatever form, managed to survive as long as it did. Over the course of the decade the National Party simply had a near impossible time determining what it stood for. This was not the sort of question that it had to ask in the decades after 1948. But once Mandela and the ANC won the 1994 elections by an overwhelming margin, and as the ANC consolidated its strength and support with each passing election, it was more and more clear that the Nats were simply interested in maintaining whatever power they could. Party leadership, embodied in Marthinus van Schalkwyk, whose detractors call him “Kortbroek,” (which means “Short pants” in Afrikaans – suffice it to say that this is not an endearing nickname), seemed far more interested in maintaining whatever access they could to the spoils of power and far less interested in proposing a viable alternative to the ANC.
It was time for the Nats to go. Forever the party would carry the legacy of apartheid, one of the more evil totalitarian ideologies in a century beset by evil totalitarianism. Its blending with the ANC may represent the final symbolic nail in the coffin of that racist regime. At the same time, it is becoming clear that a true, nonracial, conservative alternative must emerge to give South Africans a real choice in how they are governed. For many years observers of South African politics, yours truly among them, have argued that it was likely that the ANC alliance would splinter, with the more leftist Congress of South African Trade Unionions (COSATU) and South African Communist Party (SACP) forming their own separate coalition on the left, with the ANC as the dominant left-center party. This would leave room for the emergence of a legitimate conservative party based not on the old canards of race, but rather on a different conception on issues of, say, economic development or foreign policy. One can only hope that the demise of the National Party, the old dinosaur of apartheid, the party of Malan and Strijdom, Verwoerd and Vorster, Botha and de Klerk will prove to mark the ultimate end of one phase of South African history even as it signals the rebirth of another.