Howard Barrell
More National Party MPs are expected to follow the party’s Gauteng leader, Sam de Beer, who defected to the United Democratic Movement on Thursday.
De Beer’s defection is further evidence of the disintegration of the once powerful NP and is a hammer blow to the fragile leadership of Marthinus van Schalkwyk.
De Beer was one of the NP’s more able parliamentarians, in charge of black education towards the end of the previous apartheid administration. His departure from the NP means that, in the past two years, the party has lost its national leader, FW de Klerk, its Cape leader, Hernus Kriel, its secretary general, Roelf Meyer, and now its Gauteng leader.
The NP has also recently lost a string of by-elections, mainly to the Democratic Party, in areas in which it was once dominant.
De Beer’s defection represents a coup for Meyer and the UDM. Opinion polls indicate that support for the party is growing in the Eastern Cape, Natal, Western Cape and Gauteng. Observers believe it could upset or hold the balance of power in one or two provinces at the general election, pencilled in for May next year.