Botha’s Party Suffers Election Setback

President Pieter W. Botha’s ruling National Party suffered a serious political setback Wednesday when the far-right Conservative Party won two parliamentary by-elections despite a massive government effort to regain the seats.

The Conservatives not only retained both seats, first won a year ago, but also significantly increased their pluralities after a hard-hitting campaign attacking the Nationalists’ step-by-step reforms as a sellout of white interests.

The severe election defeat, as a result, could bring a further retreat by Botha from an already modest program of political reforms lest he anger the white electorate even more.

The Conservative candidate in Standerton, a farming community 65 miles southeast of Johannesburg, tripled his plurality over his Nationalist rival, for whom Botha had personally campaigned.

In Schweizer-Reneke, a rural constituency 180 miles southwest of Johannesburg, the Conservative candidate increased the party’s plurality fourfold, although senior Cabinet members had campaigned hard against him.

“Stay white, my people,” the Conservatives declared in their campaign posters. “Black participation means black takeover.”

The Nationalists’ control of the country’s white-led minority government was not at risk; they have been in power for 40 years and hold a strong majority in the white House of Assembly in the tricameral Parliament.

But the party’s two defeats--with a third likely later this month in another by-election--suggest that it has little hope of persuading the rural Afrikaner, traditionally the party’s backbone, of the need for faster and broader political reforms bringing the country’s black majority into the government in an effort to resolve the prolonged crisis here.

May Be More Cautious

And that implies a more cautious attitude by the government, greater attention to popular white fears about the direction and speed of change and even an effective veto for the far right on many, if not most, political reforms.

“The choice is between bad and worse,” the Johannesburg newspaper Business Day commented in an editorial. “It may be an appalling thought, but the growing power of the extreme right is so serious a threat that we believe the Conservative Party has to be opposed at every turn, even if it means voting for the Nationalists.”

Although Botha led the Nationalists to a sweeping, overall victory in the whites-only parliamentary elections last May, the Conservatives took many seats--including those at Schweizer-Reneke and Standerton--from the Nationalists in that election.

While they won just 22 of the 166 seats in the white House of Assembly last May, they polled 26% of the overall vote--and more than half of the Afrikaner vote--and became the official opposition.

The Conservatives contend that any concession on sharing political power, which the Nationalists see as the only ultimate solution to South Africa’s fundamental problems, means an end to what the Conservatives call “white self-determination,” or continued minority white rule here.

Their basic pitch to worried whites is to keep South Africa unchanged by reinforcing apartheid, this country’s system of racial separation and minority white rule.

The Conservative Party also has close ties, however, to the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, a paramilitary group with a neo-fascist, white-supremacist philosophy, that increasingly is confronting the Nationalists and the government and talking of right-wing rebellion against erosion of white rule.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu said he will try to persuade Western governments to break diplomatic relations with South Africa until it eases restrictions on anti-apartheid groups, news agencies reported from Nairobi, Kenya, where Tutu was attending a church conference.