South Africa A Lurch to the Right

By William E. Smith

Nearly every aspect of life in South Africa is a stark study in black and white. That was clearer than ever last week after a strong swing to the right in a whites-only national election. A jubilant State President P.W. Botha, whose party increased its seats in Parliament, went on national television after declaring victory and said, "The outside world must accept that the white electorate is here to stay and has a special duty in South Africa." To Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the country's best-known blacks, the election carried a very different lesson. Said the 1984 Nobel Peace laureate: "We have entered the darkest age in the history of our country."

The ruling National Party, which has been in power since 1948, won 52% of the popular vote and 123 of the 166 elected seats in the all-white House of Assembly. But the surprise winner was the far-right Conservative Party, a group of former Nationalists who broke away from the party five years ago because they thought the government was making too many concessions to the country's 30 million nonwhites. It received 26% of the vote and increased its parliamentary strength from 17 to 22 seats.

While the right was getting stronger, parties advocating changes in apartheid, the country's system of racial separation, were the big losers. The Progressive Federal Party won just 14% of the vote, and its seats in Parliament dropped from 25 to 19. The P.F.P. was the official opposition party in the outgoing Parliament, but that role will now be assumed by the Conservatives. The New Republic Party, another liberal group, lost four of its five seats. Acknowledged Progressive Leader Colin Eglin: "I cannot deny that the results pose a major setback for the P.F.P. and the concept of a reform alliance developing into an alternative government. There is no doubt that the election in its totality represents a lurch to the right."

The three-month election campaign was marked by ferment and friction among the country's 5 million whites. Afrikaners, the descendants of the country's first European settlers, had previously been a largely cohesive group that generally opposed change. But in recent times a growing number of them have been discussing the need for fresh approaches to racial policies. Leaders of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church and professors from several universities have called for new thinking about old problems.

White voters listened to the debate, but that did not stop them from casting their ballots in overwhelming numbers for parties advocating a . continuation of apartheid. Several recent events apparently combined to bring about the swing to the right. The white electorate was still shocked and angry over the economic sanctions imposed last year by the U.S., Canada and most West European countries. Whites were also worried about the current period of internal unrest, the most prolonged in the country's history. And though many were troubled by the government's handling of the eleven-month-old state of emergency, under which 20,000 people have been detained without trial, they were even more concerned about the possibility of an escalating guerrilla war. Some whites might quarrel with the legality of an occasional South African raid on a neighboring country to strike at the black liberation movement, but the majority obviously approved of such actions. The last days of the campaign were marked by violence surrounding a strike by transport workers in the Johannesburg area and protests by black and white students at several universities. In such an atmosphere of unrest, white voters rushed to the parties that seemed to promise them security.

State President Botha appealed to white fears with a law-and-order campaign. He touched nationalist sentiment by frequently telling foreigners to butt out of South African affairs. Through a heavy newspaper advertising blitz, reinforced by intensive coverage on national television, the government charged that the P.F.P. was soft on terrorism and Communism and ready to sell out white South Africa to the country's blacks. The Afrikaans-language press harped on the same theme, making much of a photograph of P.F.P. Stalwart Helen Suzman being embraced by Winnie Mandela, wife of the long-imprisoned black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela.

Most surprised and elated of all by the election results were the leaders of the Conservative Party. The Johannesburg regional chairman, Clive Derby- Lewis, said the party would now demand that the government enforce racial segregation in housing and reinstate the pass laws that restricted the migration of blacks to cities. Those laws, which are deeply hated by South African blacks, were repealed a year ago. Conservative Party Leader Andries Treurnicht declared that the election results "put us in a strong position for challenging the government on reform." With the Conservatives making such demands in their new role as the main opposition party, the primary debate in Parliament will now be between the government, whose devotion to reform is ; halfhearted at best, and those who oppose all reforms.

The liberal Progressives were stunned by the election and left puzzling over what had actually happened. They could be satisfied that Helen Suzman easily returned to Parliament for a ninth time, but little else. The party lost ground in Natal, where it has traditionally been strong, because it had supported a proposal for a multiracial, black-led provincial government in cooperation with KwaZulu Chief Minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Worried about the future, large numbers of English-speaking South Africans, who normally are more liberal on racial issues than the Afrikaners, jumped this time from the Progressives to the National Party. Concluded an editorial in the Johannesburg newspaper Business Day: "English voters, sacrificing at last the role of keepers of a liberal flame, chose to liquidate themselves as an identifiable political force."

The only bright spot for liberals in the election returns was the showing of three reform-minded independent candidates. Wynand Malan, who quit the National Party in January to protest the government's slow changes on racial issues, scored an easy victory in Johannesburg's Randburg district. Denis Worrall, South Africa's former Ambassador to Britain, came within just 39 votes of beating Minister of Constitutional Development Chris Heunis, the architect of Botha's reform program and his possible successor, in Heunis' once safe Helderberg district near Cape Town. In the Afrikaner university town of Stellenbosch, another Nationalist defector, Esther Lategan, was beaten by an incumbent M.P., though she managed to reduce her opponent's majority from 5,622 votes in 1981 to 1,781. Nonetheless, with the liberal parties in disarray and only one independent candidate actually making it into the new Parliament, the challenge to the government from the moderate left had been effectively removed.

The election results were sharply criticized by shocked nonwhite leaders inside and outside the country. In Cape Town, the Rev. Allan Boesak told a press conference, "White voters have made their position clear. They support the state of emergency. They support the detention of thousands of children without trial, and they support the actions of the security forces." All that was left for opponents of the government to do, he continued, was to resist "as strongly as we can." Almost as vehement in his criticism of the election results was Chief Minister Buthelezi of the KwaZulu homeland, who is often described as the country's leading black moderate. He declared, "I am totally appalled at what happened, and I see a long, hard, costly political grind ahead." Oliver Tambo, head of the African National Congress, from his headquarters in Zambia, called the election a "grand show of racism" and added, "There is no alternative to armed struggle."

The prospect is for more political and racial polarization in South Africa. Botha's Nationalists, fearful that their greatest threat is from voters who think their modest reforms are going too far, are less likely than ever to make any serious changes in the apartheid system. The country's black majority, on the other hand, now has little hope of achieving race reforms through the national government. The sad outcome for South Africa will be still more violence and still more repression.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Stellenbosch and Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg