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South Africa in a Time of Transition
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15413 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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12 / 1989 |
2,418 Words |
| Author
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Robert I. Rotberg
Robert I. Rotberg is president of Lafayette College in Easton,
Pennsylvania. |
Whites in South Africa endorsed liberal reform in September's national election, when President Frederik W. de Klerk received the mandate he wanted. Now a skeptical world watches closely to see how he and his new government act.
Past South African leaders talked energetically of reform while doing too little--certainly far less than the black majority and the Western world demanded. De Klerk says that he wants to do far more and to advance the cause of power sharing in tension-filled South Africa. Whether he and his government have a clear plan for change is, however, far less certain.
Although de Klerk's National Party lost almost 30 seats in an elected parliament of 166, the left leaning Democratic Party gained a surprising 33 seats. Together, nearly 75 percent of the white electorate thus voted in September in favor of either moderate or rapid change. The right-wing Conservative Party juggernaut gathered steam, but its 39 seats were fewer than it had forecast, and a long way behind the National Party's total. Admittedly, the Conservatives made substantial gains over their 27 seats in the 1987 poll and even won seats for the first time outside the Transvaal: in the Orange Free State and the Cape Province.
These results show that white South Africa is once again divided. The Conservative Party has tightened its political lock on blue-collar constituencies and on the farming vote outside the Cape. Twenty-five percent of the whites demonstrated a fierce disdain for dialogue with blacks. They fear change and what a new de Klerk government might bargain away to blacks. They particularly worry that the cornerstones of hard-line apartheid will not only be eroded, as they have already been, but that the bedrock of residential segregation and educational separation will be lost together with all pretense of the maintenance of "standards."
The election results demonstrate that the ruling National Party is now largely free from substantial pressure from the right. Analysts in South Africa think that the Conservatives have approached the apogee of their appeal, even to those who look worriedly toward black Africa. Moreover, the national party has shed itself of Afrikaners to the right and the left. No longer can that party regard itself as the only, or even the prime, home of the volk. The supporters of the National Party are now demonstrably English- as well as Afrikaans-speaking.
The Democratic Party attracted the electoral support of
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