The dream of founding a new National Party is over for Roelf Meyer, courtesy of the NP’s elite, reports Marion Edmunds
FALLEN National Party hero, Roelf Meyer, has been outmanoeuvred by his opponents. His more conservative colleagues, led by executive director Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Western Cape Premier Hernus Kriel, pressured leader FW de Klerk to take sides against Meyer for the first time this week, to crush his attempts to build the foundations of a new party.
De Klerk moved swiftly to close down Meyer’s show on Wednesday, disbanding his task team and taking over its mission for himself. This leaves Kriel, Van Schalkwyk and, to a lesser extent, KwaZulu-Natal’s Danie Schutte the party’s chief strategic players. Meyer stands, humiliated, on the brink of resigning.
Van Schalkwyk wants the party to be a “centre-right” party, which will attract alliance partners in the run-up to the coming elections by virtue of providing an alternative to the African National Congress. Kriel wants to perpetuate power in the Western Cape by attracting Afrikaans-speaking coloured and white voters.
Loose talk from Meyer’s camp of “disbanding” the party and rash task-team discussions with ANC dissidents, threatened the future of the NP elite who believed Meyer’s moves and stance were premature.
The elite’s patience with Meyer snapped when the issue of disbanding emerged earlier this week.
“If we had all stuck to the rules it should not have happened,” Kriel said. “The disbandment of the party was never an option. The task team was a procedural thing. It was meant to work with parties in Parliament; look forward towards an election alliance in 1999, like the sort in which the ANC participates; and from there to have established something new like a party.”
Such a party would only have been formed in the next century, but the elections would have played an important unifying role among alliance parties. Kriel also indicated that he was not happy with the calibre of people Meyer had approached.
Meyer’s Gauteng support base was counting the cost of their hero’s demise this week. “I do not think that De Klerk is the right person to form a new movement,” said a Gauteng party stalwart. “He is so tainted by the truth commission and we know that black people do not like him, like they like Roelf.
“Roelf moves around, he has a real vibe with black people … and now the whole idea of a new movement will be hijacked by the Democratic Party and I will probably be joining them too.”
Meyer is now seeking guidance from such supporters before deciding his next move. Staying on looks unlikely.
His efforts to pull the party on to new ground have been thrown back in his face and his leadership has been compromised – since 1994 he has slid from star negotiator, to Cabinet minister, to secretary general, to task-team convenor and now to plain MP. Other members of the task team are likely to follow him out of the door.