for the national Party's humiliating defeats in Standerton and Schweizer- Reneke.
Botha brushed the results off as a "temporary disappointment", and said, somewhat enigmatically: "Foreign interference, as well as actions by radical elements that break internal laws undoubtedly cause aversion to patriotic voters." When John Vorster was Prime Minister, "foreign interference" and "radical elements" were precisely the factors which led people to vote for the NP in its landslide1977 general election triumph. Between then and now something fundamental has changed. Though their concerns are the same, rural Afrikaner voters in the north of the country no longer trust the National Party to safeguard their interests.
The most noteworthy feature of the Conservative Party's showing was that it increased its support despite the NP's use of all methods at its disposal to win back the seats, including a timely crackdown on anti-apartheid opposition and a vicious smear campaign in the Afrikaans press. In Standerton the CP trebled its majority from 952 to 2 854 while in Schweizer-Reneke it increased its majority from 151 to 794. This setback for the NP has added momentum to the CP's next challenge – the nationwide municipal elections in October.
The CP representative in the TransvaaI, Chris van den Heever, predicted his party would take control of local councils throughout the Transvaal, in the platteland and in blue- collar urban areas. The Randfontein by-election later this month will be an important indicator of whether blue-collar workers are swinging to the CP in the same measure as rural voters. If Wednesday's results are extended throughout the province, the NP can no longer be confident of retaining control of a single town council in the Transvaal outside of Johannesburg, including Pretoria.
Effective CP control over white local government in the Transvaal must be giving the NP nightmares – particularly its Transvaal leader, PW de Klerk, whose own political future is on the line. Political scientist and veteran pollster Willem Kleynhans was surprised by the size of the CP victories – a swing of eight percent in Standerton and three percent in Schweizer-Reneke. "If they repeat this in a general election, they will win at the very minimum every seat in which the National Party has a majority of less than 1 000 that's 11 seats in the Transvaal, three in the Free State and one in the Cape." It is probable that were there a general election this year, the CF could at least double its current tally of 20 seats in the white chamber.
However, the really big winner seems to be the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) whose links with the CP were exploited to the full by, newspapers such as Beeld. The only effect of that appears to 'have been to drive more voters into the CP. The propaganda campaign – inadvertently revealed that rural Transvaal whites don't really mind the AWE's neo fascist image and behaviour – a factor the government will have to take into account if it ever considers banning it if has also shown that kragdadige election eve gestures –like bombing Angola and effectively banning 17 anti-apartheid organisations – do not impress rightwing voters enough to win them back to the. NP.
The National Party, like the United. Party of old, is increasingly being forced to rely on English-speaking support, in Johannesburg, Natal and the Eastern Cape, to compensate for the loss of the northern Afrikaners. The major difference with history is that, unlike the NP of old, the CP is not a national coalition. It is regionally based in the Transvaal and Orange Free State and without a major breakthrough among Afrikaner voters in the Cape Province the ceiling on the number of seats it can win, falls short of an overall majority in the country.
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
