Botha’s Gradual Reform Plans to Be Tested Today in Parliamentary Elections

President Pieter W. Botha’s plans for step-by-step reforms of apartheid, South Africa’s system of racial separation, will be tested today in five parliamentary by-elections that will measure the extent of the white backlash after more than a year of civil unrest.

If Botha’s ruling National Party retains the five seats at stake by good margins, the president will be ready to move faster and more boldly on reforms, knowing that he still has broad support among the white electorate, according to well-informed party officials.

But if the party loses seats to the right-wing Conservative Party, Botha is likely to proceed more cautiously, these sources suggested, to avoid alienating white voters and feeding white fears that already have led to some vigilante attacks on blacks. The Conservatives are battling hard to take two or three seats away from the Nationalists.

For these reasons, political analysts here are describing the elections as among the most crucial in South Africa’s history, affecting the pace and scope of the country’s political, economic and social reforms.

Confident of Victory

“It is going to be very close, but I think we should retain all five seats provided there is not a low turnout,” said Chris Rencken, the National Party’s chief information officer and a member of Parliament. “In by-elections, there tends to be a significant grievance vote because people do not see the future of the country at stake--though it is in this election-- and people tend to blame the government for just about everything, including the weather.”

But the Conservative Party, which broke from the Nationalists in 1982 over Botha’s plans for “healthy power sharing” with other races, believes that whites are so “anxious and angry,” as one party official put it, that “they are going to desert the Nats in droves” over its handling of the continuing unrest.

“Every black attack on whites is a couple of hundred votes for us in each constituency,” said Gert Parsons, the Conservative candidate in Springs, southeast of Johannesburg. “People want a strong government, with a clear plan for the future and ready to take strong action to implement it, and they will use this election, I think, to send this message to the National Party.”

The other major issue is the South African economy, now in its deepest recession since the Depression of the 1930s, with little prospect of immediate improvement. Unemployment among whites has soared; inflation is running at nearly 17% a year; business bankruptcies and home foreclosures are widespread, and a few white children are going barefoot and being fed by charity in programs that are normally aimed at helping blacks.

Noting that public opinion surveys have shown almost a 50% increase in voter support for the Conservatives over the past year and that Conservative candidates have cut deeply into National Party pluralities in elections during this period, a spokesman for the right-wing group predicted “two victories and perhaps a third upset--enough to stop this government dead in its reformist tracks.”

Cabinet Ministers Campaign

Botha, concerned about the evident loss of support for his party and thus for his strategy of gradual reform, campaigned personally in three constituencies and dispatched senior ministers to all five to rally National loyalists.

“In times of difficulty, danger and crisis, all responsible people must stand together,” Botha told a rally in Vryburg this week, invoking both the pioneering spirit of his Afrikaner people and their traditional desire for harmony. “I come to ask you for national unity in these difficult times and not to let the wagon get stuck in the river, but to pull it through and go forward.”

The elections will be held in Springs, an industrial town with high unemployment that is adjacent to several of the most volatile black townships around Johannesburg; in Vryburg, 225 miles southwest of Johannesburg, where the National Party candidate is being challenged by both the Conservative Party and the Herstigte Nasionale, a party even further to the right; in Bethlehem and Sasolburg, two very conservative constituencies in the Orange Free State, and in Durban, where a five-way race in Port Natal offers the National Party its only easy victory.

With the last general election having been held in 1981 and another not likely for three years, today’s voting will provide only an indication of constituent feelings and will not change the Nationalists’ control of the House of Assembly, the white chamber of Parliament.

Before these vacancies occurred, the Nationalists had 129 seats compared to the Progressive Federal Party’s 26 and the Conservatives’ 18.

Coalition Effort

In Johannesburg, there is a four-way race for a vacant City Council seat that will determine whether control of the council will go to a coalition of the National Party and independent members, or to the liberal white Progressive Federal Party.

In the parliamentary elections, called after the resignations or deaths of five National Party members of Parliament, the Conservatives are hoping to win Bethlehem and Vryburg, and they rate Springs a possibility. In Sasolburg, they are supporting the Herstigte Nasionale, which has made a local interracial marriage, one of the first in the country, a major campaign issue.

But the Nationalists’ superior organization and financing, along with loyalties established over the 37 years that the party has been in power, may pull them to victory in all five districts, though with greatly reduced margins.