Botha’s Party Feels It Must Soundly Defeat Left, Right

After ruling South Africa for nearly 40 years, the National Party is in its toughest election battle yet, not so much to retain its immediate hold on power here as to shape the country’s future.

To win the whites-only parliamentary election next month is not enough; President Pieter W. Botha’s Nationalists want to win big, soundly defeating their critics on both the right and the left.

Stoffel van der Merwe, the deputy minister for information and a top party spokesman, said the Nationalists want an undisputed mandate to pursue their plans for step-by-step political reforms and to negotiate a “power-sharing” arrangement with the country’s black majority.

A big win, Van der Merwe contended, is necessary not only to quiet the party’s white critics, particularly on the far right, but to convince blacks that waiting for the Nationalists’ collapse is futile and that they should begin negotiations now, largely on the government’s terms.

“If we are seen as losing our grip on the white electorate with big losses, then the result would be demotivating for reform,” Van der Merwe, one of the National Party’s most prominent liberals, said in an interview. “Blacks would not be encouraged to negotiate if they thought we were on our way out, but just the opposite. . . . Nobody sees any need to negotiate with a loser.”

In Van der Merwe’s view, the best election result would be a substantial Nationalist win in which the party manages to take seats from both the Progressive Federal Party on the left and the Conservative Party on the right, to increase its 127-seat share in the 178-member white House of Assembly in South Africa’s three-chamber Parliament.

That would put the government in an unchallengeable position of strength, according to National Party thinking, and enable it to make the political concessions that probably will be necessary to start negotiations with some moderate black leaders.

The addition of more liberal Nationalists to the party’s parliamentary caucus would also help bring broader political changes. Many of the retiring members of Parliament, including several Cabinet ministers, did not favor faster reforms.

‘More Reform-Minded’

“The new caucus will be far more reform-minded than the old one,” Van der Merwe predicted, “and the caucus is the body with which the Cabinet has to work day to day as its link with the electorate.”

But Van der Merwe, who himself faces a difficult three-way race in his Helderkruin constituency northwest of Johannesburg, acknowledged that, with the concerted attacks on the National Party during the campaign, its majority “will probably shrink and is unlikely to grow” in the May 6 election.

If Nationalist losses were to total 30 seats and be yielded mostly to rightist candidates, the government’s reform plans, already criticized inside the party as too cautious, would be slowed further and perhaps halted, Van der Merwe said. If losses were mostly to the left, then the effect would be “some encouragement” but not a great impetus for reform.

“What would be bad, the worst, would be equal losses to the left and right,” he added, “because that would bring political paralysis.”

But the Nationalists have not yet been able to develop the groundswell of support for either the party or its plans for moderate reforms that was expected when President Botha first announced the election at the start of the year. Instead, it appears to be struggling to keep even the focus of its own campaign on the reform issue.

‘Abysmal’ Debate Level

“This is probably the most crucial election in the country’s history,” another Nationalist member of Parliament said, “and the level of debate is abysmal. We in the National Party want to talk about the future of the country--whether there will be a South Africa and what it will look like--and we don’t seem to be able to get beyond the normal pettiness of party politics.”

Election rallies, even when they offer a chance to question and perhaps heckle government ministers, have generally been drawing fewer than 200 people, and Van der Merwe said that voter apathy could prove the party’s greatest campaign problem.

The main reason for that, he said, is the party’s inability to outline the reforms it envisages in other than general terms and to provide assurances sought by most whites that “power-sharing” will not reduce their present power and privileges or change their life styles.

Vagueness Costly

“This vagueness is costing us votes, left, right and center, almost literally,” Van der Merwe said.

The government’s predicament, he continued, is that anything it says now will probably undermine eventual negotiations, either by giving away bargaining chips or by discouraging black participation.

“In order not to prejudice the negotiations, we can’t come out with a blueprint,” he said. “We have to be vague.”

But Botha, in an interview broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corp. last weekend, again made clear the limits of how far he would go on political reform, ruling out any system that would lead to black majority rule or mean a black head of state for the country.

“I am not prepared to sacrifice my rights so that the other man can dominate me with his greater numbers,” Botha said of the future in South Africa, where blacks now outnumber whites 5 to 1.

He added that British-style parliamentary democracy had failed in most African countries, many of which had adopted one-party systems, and said that South Africa would have to develop a constitutional structure suited to its own problems.

‘Trust-Us’ Mandate

With these assurances to apprehensive white voters, the Nationalists are seeking a “trust-us” mandate to proceed with reforms and eventual negotiations and then to come back, either in another election or a referendum, for approval of any agreement.

“It’s like moving house . . . to another city where you can’t do your own search each day,” Van der Merwe said, using an explanation he gives questioning voters. “What you do is give the specifications to an agent who does the scouting and comes back to you with a proposal . . . .

“This is the kind of mandate we are asking for, a mandate to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with the black people, and we will come back to the voters for approval.”

Under this scenario, the government would like to bring an initial agreement to voters during full elections that are required by the end of 1989 in the constitution which established the present tricameral Parliament, adding Indian and Colored (mixed-race) chambers to the white House of Assembly.

Reforms in Stages

With a renewed mandate, the government would then proceed with further negotiations, implementing the reforms in stages and keeping the possibility of a referendum open until the new constitutional framework is nearly complete.

But Van der Merwe, a political scientist who is one of the Nationalists’ strategists on reform, is not sure himself whether even this step-by-step scenario is realistic.

“We had expected to be further than we are now,” he said of the reform process, “but the violence and international sanctions prevented progress. White political energies went into the security situation and dealing with sanctions. The black political climate made negotiations impossible.”

When Botha first announced the election at the beginning of the year, he indicated that the Nationalists would be putting specific ideas on political reforms before the voters; so far, however, the party has stuck to the broad goals outlined last year and reaffirmed by Botha earlier this month, and its candidates have been cautioned against saying anything else.

The reason appears to be the strength of the Conservative Party, which split from the Nationalists five years ago over planned reforms and which shows signs of winning wide support among whites in rural areas and in working-class suburbs. According to Nationalist sources, Botha decided that any specific plans would just give his critics additional, highly emotional issues.

‘Many Waverers’

“We have many waverers,” Van der Merwe said of National Party supporters, “and they are wavering nearer to the right than the left.

“For the sake of reform, we need a secure power base, and it is better to get back those wavering on the right. Reform is on the road ahead, and we can catch up with those wavering to the left. This election is to build a power base for reform, and it is better to secure our constituency to the right.”

A major reason for calling the election, Van der Merwe acknowledged, was that the Conservatives’ criticism was “too close to the truth” that the government had no mandate for many of the reform measures it had adopted or was considering.

The Conservative Party has already made a major campaign issue of the proposed relaxation of residential segregation by permitting cities to decide whether to integrate individual suburbs, and F.W. de Klerk, the Nationalist Party leader in Transvaal province, calls it “the really troublesome issue,” one for which the government has few answers at present.

Residential segregation, Van der Merwe said, will undoubtedly be changed, but it probably will not be dropped entirely.

‘Such an Important Thing’

“For many, it is such an important thing to live with their own people that this cannot be done away with at present,” he said. “People derive a sense of security from the Group Areas Act (segregating residential areas and some business districts by race), but security should not depend on a single legislative act but on an overall political system.

“The Group Areas Act and a future political system is a package deal and should be negotiated at the same time.”

However large the Nationalist victory next month, the Conservatives will remain “a big factor,” Van der Merwe added. “They can’t be dealt with once and for all. . . . The reforms we have to carry out will make the 1983 constitution (which caused the party split) look like a kindergarten. We have very substantial and politically unpalatable issues coming up, and that’s why we need an indisputable victory.”