South Africa Running Against America

By Bruce W. Nelan/Cape Town

With the verve and vigor they usually reserve for their favorite rugby matches, South Africa's white politicians last week set off on a three-month- long election campaign. On May 6, almost two years before the next constitutionally mandated election, the country's 3 million white voters will go to the polls to elect a new all-white legislature. Although it will not be a referendum on any specific issue or program, State President P.W. Botha is, in effect, asking for a vote of confidence on his hard-line responses to black activists at home and economic sanctions from abroad.

As Botha and his governing National Party candidates swung into action, it appeared that their real opponent was not South Africa's other political parties but the U.S. Government. In his speech opening the campaign, Botha bemoaned the "prejudice, abuse and dishonesty South Africa had to endure at the hands of cynical and sanctimonious antagonists abroad." Lest there be any doubt about the target, Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha, who is no relation to the President, candidly admitted that his party would be tapping the "strong anti-U.S. feeling in this country." It is time, he said, "to show the U.S. Congress they will not coerce us." It is "dangerous," added Botha, to follow the U.S. in decisions on world affairs. "They are hopeless."

State President Botha enters the campaign confident that his strategy will keep in power the National Party, which has ruled the country since 1948. He assumes that South Africa's white voters want a period of calm after so much turbulence. Since Botha declared a national state of emergency last June, incidents of political violence have dwindled to just a handful a day. According to government figures, the number of deaths in racial conflicts dropped from 665 to 251 between the first and the second half of last year. Under the country's harsh press restrictions, no violent incidents can be reported on or photographed by journalists. The decreased coverage adds to the public's sense of returning normality. Botha's anti-Americanism theme is likely to win a favorable response. In 1977 his party ran a campaign against Jimmy Carter, who was then pressuring South Africa for changes in apartheid policies, and won a resounding victory.

The National Party completely dominates the outgoing Parliament, holding 127 of the 178 seats. Nothing less than an opposition landslide could turn it out of power, and that is unlikely. Nonetheless, political analysts are looking to the election for signs that the country's white voters are moving either to the left or right of the Nationalists. The results could thus influence any future liberalization of apartheid laws.

The most credible rightist threat is the Conservative Party, which currently holds 18 seats in Parliament. It will fight the election on the easy-to-understand platform of a return to full separation of the races, a policy it calls "partition." Says Spokesman Cornelius Mulder: "Subdivide the land; don't share political power." But even Conservative Leader Andries Treurnicht, who accuses the Nationalists of capitulating to black demands and endangering white South Africans, entertains no hope of taking over the government. He and his strategists would like to win enough seats to replace the moderate Progressive Federal Party as the official opposition. His efforts will be strengthened if he is able to form a united front with the ultraright Herstigte National Party, which now has only one seat in Parliament but hopes for more.

On the liberal side, the strongly antiapartheid Progressive Federal Party is struggling to retain its position as the opposition party, a role it has held for more than nine years. It has been handicapped, however, by the confidence-dashing resignation a year ago of its dynamic leader, Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, 46. The party's new chief, Colin Eglin, hopes to increase its seats from 27 to about 40. That may be more of a dream than a hope. Forty seats, he speculates, could make the P.F.P. large enough that some relatively liberal National Party Members of Parliament might join forces with it. "We are moving toward alliance politics rather than traditional politics," says Eglin. "The process of building up an alternative government is going to get started."

Eglin and other political pundits estimate that there are up to 30 so- called New Nats, who might leave the National Party if they could help take over the government. This strategy received some support last month when Wynand Malan, one of the best known of them, announced that he was resigning from the party and would run as an independent candidate. But Eglin's ploy still seems a long shot. No other M.P.s joined Malan in leaving the party, and he said that he would not join the P.F.P. "because there are too many things in the party philosophy with which I do not agree."

Another jolt of political excitement hit the new campaign with the news that Denis Worrall, the country's ambassador in London, was resigning his post and coming home. Insiders say that Worrall, a former National Party M.P., could no longer defend his country's racial policies abroad. He reportedly plans to run for Parliament as an independent.

Left out of the political hurly-burly altogether, of course, are the great majority of South Africans: the blacks, mixed-race coloreds and Indians, who make up 85% of the country's population of 33 million. Colored and Indian representatives sit in two largely powerless houses of the tricameral Parliament and represent 4 million people, but they do not face elections until 1989. The country's 24 million blacks have even less of a say in running the country, since they enjoy no political rights at all at the national level. Says Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town and a leading black spokesman: "The election is, for us, a nonevent."