De Klerk to Pull Party Out of S. African Government

Less than 24 hours after the adoption of a historic constitution, apartheid’s white former rulers said they will withdraw from President Nelson Mandela’s coalition government and enter a new era as the country’s main opposition.

National Party leader and Deputy President Frederik W. de Klerk and six Cabinet members will depart June 30 after two years of power-sharing, but the party will retain its 82 seats in the 490-member Parliament. De Klerk had said repeatedly and as recently as Wednesday that he might quit the government.

At at news conference where boisterous supporters chanted his name, De Klerk cast his announcement as a natural outgrowth of a functioning democracy. “We are not taking this decision in a negative spirit. . . . We are not sour,” he said. “We believe that the development of a strong and vigilant opposition is essential for the maintenance and promotion of genuine multi-party democracy. . . . We have reached a natural watershed in the transformation of our society.”

But he also lashed out at Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) for undermining the power of minority parties.

“The new constitution contains no provision for any form of joint decision-making in the executive branch of government,” he said. “The ANC is acting more and more as if they no longer need multi-party government.”

The decision to pull out followed weeks of bitter wrangling with the ANC over clauses in the new constitution. In the end, the NP played a crucial role in pushing the charter through, because the ANC lacked the two-thirds majority needed to ratify it.

The document calls for a majority-rule system enabling the party that wins more than half the seats in Parliament to select the president, who appoints a Cabinet. After the 1994 election--the nation’s first all-race balloting--any party receiving at least 10% of the vote was entitled to join the Cabinet.

The ANC won 63% of the 1994 vote and holds 252 seats in Parliament. The NP won less than 21% of the vote.

While Mandela welcomed the pullout as a reflection of “the fact that our young democracy has come of age and would need a vigorous opposition unfettered by its participation in the executive government,” other ANC members were less congenial.

“One gets the impression there was a fair amount of sour grapes because they didn’t manage to get their way in the constitutional process,” said Carl Niehaus, an ANC member of Parliament. “But there’s no crisis. It will actually improve the functioning of this government.”

It is unclear whether the NP can forge a credible opposition--which it will become for the first time since it assumed power in 1948--in a nation with a black majority and a history of white oppression.

One option is to form a coalition with other political parties such as Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party or the smaller but vocal Democratic Party. But the NP’s relations with both parties have been rocky, and they disagree on many issues.

“The National Party’s credibility is pretty weak at the moment,” said Tony Leon, leader of the Democratic Party. “But,” he added, “we must keep the door open.”

Still, some conservative whites, the NP’s core constituency, are complaining that with their party’s departure they will lose their voice in government.

“Up to now, Afrikaners had access to political power. We had access to decision-making,” said Theo de Jager, chairman of the Foundation for Equality Before the Law, an Afrikaner-rights group. “This is a final loss of power for the Afrikaner.”

Many observers said De Klerk’s move is ill-timed; it will be interpreted abroad as a sign of instability at a time when both the rand, South Africa’s currency, and foreign investment are weak, they said.

“All these things arrive at a time when we least need them,” said Tom Lodge, a political analyst at the University of the Witwatersrand. “In the end, the NP is going to be a loser. The ANC and the public will blame them for any loss in investor confidence.”

Business leaders said they would have preferred that the coalition government continue until the next presidential election, in 1999, as originally planned. But political insiders said internal squabbles over the party’s direction and relationship with the ANC convinced De Klerk to pull out and regroup to prevent the party from splintering.