Smaller conservative parties will be fighting for the same piece of the pie in the upcoming election, they told Sapa on Monday, but would have different tactics.
The Freedom Front Plus under Dr Pieter Mulder and the Herstigte Nasionale Party, led by Willie Marais, will be fighting each other for the minds of the conservative electorate whom they both claim are out in the political wilderness.
But while the FFP is all for going to the polls the HNP said it would be launching its ”don’t vote” campaign within weeks.
”Quiet but not gone” is how the HNP described itself on Monday.
Party spokesperson Louis van der Schyff said he and party leader Willie Marais were still planning to take over the country.
”We have realised that as a white group in South Africa, there is no way we can regain control at the polls. But there are other methods of regaining control of the country we love, once we have the support,” Van der Schyff said.
He argued that the HNP had not disappeared from the political scene and that it would launch its ”don’t vote” campaign with a meeting in Pretoria on February 28.
Van der Schyff said the party was calling on white South Africans with good Christian backgrounds to refrain from voting in this year’s general election.
”How can one participate in an election when you don’t recognise the authority of the ruling party or the constitution,” he said, adding that there was no way that former president F W de Klerk had had any mandate to hand over the country to the African National Congress.
But Mulder believes the polls are still the only way to win if one wanted to have a ”specialist party” in a niche market.
”We all know that the ANC will probably rule the roost for the next 15 years at least but that does not mean we can’t make an impact.”
Modelling themselves on the German Green Party, Mulder explained that by using proportional representation and strategic alliances, a minority party could still carry clout.
Mulder said that behind the scenes alliance negotiations were happening but said an announcement now could be detrimental.
He believed however that with the strong university support base they enjoyed and a more realistic manifesto which they plan to launch in Bloemfontein on February 21, the elections looked very promising.
The HNP however believed that their strategy, despite taking longer to organise, would ultimately be more successful even if it was not totally conventional.
”We are looking to reunite the Afrikaner into a formidable party through the call to nationalism,” Van der Schyff said.
”When this happened the last time under President (Hendrik) Verwoerd from 1958 to 1966 the country enjoyed the most prosperous growth ever recorded — and not only white people but blacks benefited from the economic boom,” he said, describing how South Africa was then listed within the top 10 most prosperous countries in the world.
He said that people often regarded the Afrikaner as a fragmented group with no direction but argued that this would change and warned that all Afrikaners would reunite under the HNP banner in the not too distant future.
”We know we can’t win at the polls, especially ones that are as rigged as ours are and anyway we just don’t have the numbers but those who have the power, make the rules and we will get the power without using elections,” he said. – Sapa