Some commentators see the current crisis in the National Party as a sign that it is on its last legs, reports Gaye Davis
SCENTING blood, the pundits have been quick as piranhas in pouncing on the National Party. As it thrashes about in new, uncharted political waters, analysts have set to dissecting it, stripping it of the flesh of its pre-election delusions, and delivering doom-laden prognoses for its future as a national political force.
These include suggestions that the party’s only conceivable future lies in it becoming a vehicle for coloured nationalism; the reasoning goes little further than the fact that coloured nationalists seek a political home, and that the majority of coloured people, feeling themselves marginalised by the African National Congress, will continue to see the NP as their only
There have also been suggestions that the party, should it fail to come to terms with the new challenges confronting it and the internal ferment boiling up within it as a result, will steadily disintegrate before crumbling away to
This latter view is not the sole province of political commentators, but, it could be argued, is shared by many who make up the NP’s traditional support base. A letter in a recent edition of the Afrikaans journal Insig has a white NP supporter doubting the party will still exist in five years’ time, let alone as a significant political force.
Predicting a haemorrhage of white support ahead of the next general elections in 1999, the writer says white NP supporters, confronted by the realities of the new political landscape, have found NP election promises — that power would genuinely be shared, for example, and minority rights protected — to be hollow.
And, while he expects coloured support might grow, he has little faith in the NP ever garnering mass support among black people, even among the middle-class — largely because of its past.
Dealing with that past is steadily but surely forcing itself as a priority on De Klerk — and not only in terms of allowing the party to be seen as having rid itself of its ideological baggage to make it more acceptable to black voters.
Party rank and file who may have left the ways and means of countering the fight against apartheid in the hands of the leadership, and who may not have known all that was going on, will not be sitting comfortably as allegations of murder, fraud and blackmail continue to seep into the light of day.
The past continues to haunt the NP and its leader, who is now under ever-increasing pressure to come clean. Whatever the myriad immediate problems De Klerk must tackle in order to cool his overheated caucus, curb its more wayward elements and re-forge unity in NP ranks, acknowledging past actions, instead of continuing in a state of denial, are surely key to the party’s well-being.
Within the ANC, there is a view that De Klerk’s own future may depend on this.
Says ANC MP and NEC member, Blade Nzimande: “De Klerk is the glue holding the NP together. But he’s being increasingly weakened by these allegations coming out. The more dirt about the NP that comes out, the worse it is for De Klerk. It impacts on him, on the party, and on the voters it wants to attract.”
The recent broadcast of Allister Sparks’ three- part documentary, Death of Apartheid, was seen within NP ranks not only to link De Klerk to unsavoury decisions of the past, but also to reinforce the notion that the NP came off second best in the Kempton Park negotiations.
“One of the problems the NP has is that all it had to rely on when it went into negotiations was what its civil servants were able to come up with,” says Professor Hennie Kotze of the Department of Political Studies at Stellenbosch University. “Afrikaner intellectuals left the party in the mid-Eighties, when PW Botha was in charge. Botha didn’t mind — he had his securocrats instead. But it cost the NP.
“During negotiations, the ANC — which had think tanks made up of academics and NGOs — was much better prepared. And, today, the ANC’s thinkers are all in government.”
The University of Cape Town’s Professor Herman Giliomee agrees that part of the NP’s problem lies in its lack of thinkers. “De Klerk is the only one with an over-arching view,” he says. “But it does mean the party’s much more open to other inputs, such as from business, than it was under Botha.”
In Giliomee’s view, in spite of its invidious position as part of government and part of the opposition, the NP’s demise is not imminent.
“It is still the best organised force in opposition. I don’t agree it will start disintegrating. I don’t see the same extent of loss of morale among the rank and file as some do. Nor do I agree that it will become a home for coloured nationalism — how? In this country, you need alliances.
“What force could come in its place to oppose the ANC? The elections showed there’s no room for splinter parties. Who would property owners and state employees vote for, if not the NP?”
What is crucial for the NP, says Giliomee, is that it come up with a new right-of-centre ideology and a coherent set of policies that set it clearly apart from those of the ANC — not an easy task. “One big discovery both the NP and the ANC made after the elections was how little room there was to manoeuvre in terms of radical
Devoting itself to white and coloured interests would be easier, but short-sighted. “The NP doesn’t want to seal itself off from black voters,” says Giliomee.
For the ANC’s Nzimande, this is the contradiction that will send the NP down a political cul-de-sac.
“They have no alternative vision to the old order. The party’s vision was apartheid. It’s coherence lay in implementing apartheid and in its ability to spread patronage to its supporters and MPs via the state. That’s all gone.
“Now they’re having to try to defend white minority privileges accumulated in the past and this compounds the tensions thrown up by their claiming to be a non-racial party.
‘Every speech made by NP MPs attacks affirmative action — yet their very own coloured constituency needs it. That’s a serious contradiction — and the NP’s fundamental dilemma. How is it to defend the interests of its core support base and at the same time open itself up to others?
“It is luring coloured supporters in order to survive — not because it has their interests genuinely at heart. If the NP can’t deliver to its coloured supporters, it will increasingly alienate them — and that will be the beginning of the end of the NP.”