The CP is hoping to use the local government elections to win back supremacy of the rightwing, writes Jan Taljaard
NOT shouting it out too loud, the Conservative Party is hoping to once again enter the race for rightwing supremacy after being virtually sidelined from mainstream politics.
And it hopes to achieve this by gathering more rightwing votes during the October local government elections than the other contestants competing for a slice from the same voter’s pie.
While not willing to be drawn into bluntly admitting its renewed quest for rightwing supremacy, CP leader Ferdi Hartzenberg came pretty close to it in an interview with the Weekly Mail & Guardian this week.
“The Afrikaner will unite behind the party that emerges as the strongest of those supporting self-determination for the Afrikaner,” he claimed.
In rightwing circles the announcement met with mixed reaction. The Herstigte Nasionale Party’s Jaap Marais immediately condemned it as “amusing” and fitting of the CP’s tendency to keep changing its policy on burning issues. Leader of the Freedom Front Constand Viljoen welcomed the decision, explaining that a future volkstaat will in any case be a state of many political parties.
And while those at the top of the CP hierarchy reportedly accepted the decision with nary a murmur of dissent, grumblings from grassroots supporters grew in volume as the week marched on. Their gripe centres on an apparent difficulty to reconcile the CP’s adamant stand of non- participation in the 1994 elections, and the latest decision. An election is an election, they say.
Not so, said Hartzenberg in the interview.
Comparing current circumstances to the period after the Boer War, he explained that after the Boers were defeated on the battlefield, they used the system to eventually regain freedom. According to him the current dispensation was still to come at the time of the April 1994 election and like the Boers who went to war, the CP did the right thing by keeping out of the elections. Now that the Afrikaner has been defeated the time has once again come to use the system, he said.
No, say the dissenters. Local government elections are part and parcel of the same transitional process that started with the 1994 elections.
Hartzenberg nevertheless claimed that opposition from within the ranks is minimal and will be a thing of the past come October.
He even has bad news for those supporters who are hoping that it is all part of an elaborate game of brinkmanship in which the CP will eventually try to force concessions by threatening to withdraw or by actually withdrawing.
“There is no sense in making supporters feel uncertain about whether their party is eventually going to contest the election or not. Such a supporter will lose interest if he has to wonder whether his party is in or out.”
The CP will not withdraw before the elections, but may still withdraw from elected structures if the election turns out to be a farce, Hartzenberg said.
It is, however, when he is asked about what the CP hopes to achieve in the elections, that a glimmer of the real reason of entry starts shimmering through.
“Our participation is not about winning the election. That we know is impossible. It is about uniting the Afrikaner and to achieve our ideal of self-determination.”
How does he hope to achieve that by participating and particularly if the FF and to some extent the NP will all be looking at the same voter’s pool?
“The Afrikaner will be mobilised by the election and will afterwards unite behind the organisation that proves to be the winner of those advocating the ideal of Afrikaner self- determination.”