It was hard to tell whether he was kicking him in the shin, or leaning over to pinch his thigh, but whichever it was, Marthinus van Schalkwyk was desperately trying to get Peter Marais to stop talking. It is not an easy thing to achieve at the best of times; and at the worst — and these, incontrovertibly, are surely the worst of times for
both men — it is virtually impossible.
When he is in full sail Marais gathers momentum of his own, his words frothing and tumbling out like a Vesuvian geyser. It is an impressive, certainly entertaining, and, if you are a colleague of his, thoroughly alarming sight.
The scene was played out in a melee of press conferences hurled at the media last week by each side of a political marriage in trouble. Marais was incandescent with anger; Van Schalkwyk, being incapable of anything as colourfully charismatic as incandescence, was merely angry.
“Never, ever before, anywhere, has a coalition between Christian Democrats and Liberals worked,” bellowed Marais. It was at this point that Van Schalkwyk made his indiscreet move to silence his sinking mayor. It sort of worked. Marais paused, then added, non-too-convincingly, “… maybe in South Africa it could be made to work”.
Marais is wrong about the “never anywhere” point. Being Dutch, they have cohabited in sin rather than marry, but in the Netherlands, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal party have been in a coalition, more often in government than out of it, for most of the past 20 years.
The question is whether he is also wrong about the prognosis for the South African experiment. When Van Schalkwyk took over the self-styling “New” National Party from FW de Klerk in 1997, this was his “big idea” for the party: to rebrand it in the mould of a European Christian Democrat party.
He travelled to Germany, and elsewhere, often as the guest of Christian Democrat parties and studied in his methodical way their operational and ideological configuration. Right of centre, but not too much. In favour of market capitalism, but not too much. Family values, social conservatism, but not of the extreme Thatcherite variety.
But for Van Schalkwyk this is engineering, not philosophy. He is a technocrat of a politician — and in his day, actually quite a talented one — though, as has been said many times before, obviously not a dynamic leader. He is in many ways an ideal number two and should have been content to play that second fiddle to the DA leader’s shrill trumpet call.
But he lacks political judgement, outwitted in recent times by Leon’s nimble spin fairies, and painted now into a strategic corner from which I can see no escape. If he continues to fight for Marais, he can only lose. The court can only really delay, not overturn the Democratic Party-driven decision to expunge Marais.
Van Schalkwyk’s spin-doctors say that it is a point of principle for him and the NNP. Points of principle are all very well, but in the theatre of internecine party political war there is little point in taking them on if they cannot be won.
There are plenty of people in the NNP to whom this point of principle is potentially so expensive that they would not only prefer their leader not to contest it but may well be prepared to abandon him if it looks like it will cost them their job as councillor or their seat in the provincial cabinet.
While the Morkel clan may not be quite as glamorous — or as reckless — as the other Cape Kennedys to whom they injudiciously like to compare themselves (I trust with tongue in cheek), father Gerald is the premier of the Western Cape and son, Kent, is a possible new Cape Town mayor — provided the DA lives on.
So, if Van Schalkwyk marches the NNP out of the DA, he may find that not all will follow. This is the divide-and-rule strategy of the DP. It is clever, but as always with them maybe a tad too clever. The risk is that the NNP stays united, the DA dissolves and automatically loses control of the councils where they are in power, including the Cape Town Unicity. The chance to show the electorate that they are capable of governing by building “model” sites of “alternative” government is lost. And meanwhile the African National Congress stands to gain.
If the Nats stay in the DA, the DP gets what it always wanted: absolute control, and ascendancy for its way of doing things. This is a fight about culture in the wider, not just the political sense. The one area of real diversity that the DA offered, an unprecedented political collaboration between the English-speaking white Democratic Party and the Afrikaans-speaking white and coloured National Party, has proved to be one of the cultural fault lines that has undermined its fragile foundations.
If the NNP, skint as it apparently is, leaves the shelter of the DA it is surely consigned if not immediately to the dustbin of history, then to a slow and painful death in a strictly parochial role as last repository of coloured working-class votes in the Western Cape. Slowly but surely, as the apartheid-instilled class and race divisions dilute, the ANC will eat away at this political carcass until it is no more.
Is a DA demise a cause for lament? What now for opposition politics? Whether it proves that South African Christian Democracy and neo-Liberalism — because that is really what the modern DP represents — can neither thrive nor survive in union or not, it suggests that the absence of a common set of values is fatal. Commonality of ideas, as opposed to a common enemy, is the more fertile ground for party political procreation.
Current and new entrants to the political marketplace, such as the United Democratic Movement or a new democratic socialist grouping, may also stand to benefit as the electorate looks for new ideas.
The DA is unattractive because its electoral gains were built on the back of gatvol minorities’ vote. The racial polarisation at the ballot box that this represents remains unhealthy for democracy, stimulated as it has been by the virulence of the relationship between Thabo Mbeki and Leon.
So, damned if they do, damned if they don’t, Van Schalkwyk is in a bind. With the exception of Nelson Mandela, history has proved that there are only two ways out of politics: death or failure. Unless the former spares him, I suspect the latter will be soon upon him — and his wretched party.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland