Runner-Up to ANC Arouses Blacks’ Fears

When Parliament convenes Monday to elect Thabo Mbeki of the ruling African National Congress as this country’s second black president, it will also welcome a new leader of the shrunken opposition.

Tony Leon, a 42-year-old lawyer who heads the Democratic Party, will become South Africa’s highest-ranking white politician by virtue of his party’s distant second-place finish in the June 2 elections. The Democrats won 38 seats in the 400-seat lower house of Parliament; the ANC won 266.

Leon’s rise marks a milestone in South African politics. For the first time in half a century, the top white politician will not belong to the National Party, the white-minority rulers during apartheid, or to its successor, the New National Party, the leaders of the opposition since quitting a government of national unity in 1996.

Yet the remarkable turnaround of the Democratic Party, which took a drubbing in the 1994 elections, winning just seven seats, is being met with suspicion by many blacks. Although few here mourn the passing of the Nationalists, there is fear that the wolves may be returning in sheep’s skins.

The Democrats have their roots in the white struggle against apartheid, but the ANC and others worry that their election success was built on a campaign that played to racist fears about black rule, something known as swart gevaar, which is Afrikaans for black danger.

The Democratic Party admits to a fiercely anti-ANC strategy, which it says focused on crime, corruption and the abuses of one-party dominance, not race. But the Democrats’ election slogan--”Fight Back”--was the source of great consternation in the ANC, which insisted that the intended message was “Fight Black.” At one point, the ANC plastered the country with “Don’t Fight Black” posters.

“The Democratic Party is moving further and further to the right, if it is not already there,” said ANC spokesman Thabo Masebe. “It is no longer the party of Helen Suzman.”

Suzman, 81, is an enduring symbol of white opposition to the apartheid system of racial separation. For 13 years, she was the sole member of the whites-only Parliament who challenged the racist policies of the National Party.

Now retired, Suzman campaigned on behalf of the Democratic Party, which was founded in 1989 through a merger of her Progressive Federal Party and two other white parties. She has expressed faith in Leon and the Democrats as the country’s vanguards of liberalism and, in that context, as watchdogs on the ANC.

But some political analysts say the party’s increase in support June 2--the Democrats collected a million more votes than in 1994--may make it difficult to live up to Suzman’s expectations.

Virtually overnight, the party has been transformed from an influential but tiny grouping of progressive whites into a diverse opposition movement of potentially conflicting interests. Its base of well-to-do English-speaking whites has been broadened to include Indians, people of mixed race and conservative, Afrikaans-speaking whites, many of whom previously favored the National Party and right-wing groups.

“To say the Democratic Party is a party of privilege is no longer true; it is now a party composed mainly of minorities,” said Shaun Mackay of the Johannesburg-based Center for Policy Studies. “The major challenge is to maintain its liberal identity in spite of the constituency it has picked up. There are going to be tensions.”

Democratic leaders acknowledge that the party’s electorate has changed, but they say supporters have been drawn to its unwavering liberalism--which emphasizes individual rights, personal freedoms and merit-based advancement--and to its promise to keep the sometimes heavy-handed ANC in check.

As such, the Democrats say, they need only to stay the course to maintain their following. And as more blacks join the middle class and adopt its liberal values, they say, the party will even attract voters from the ANC.

“To call us racist is laughable,” said Democratic spokesman Phillip Grobler. “The only thing that has changed is our image. In the past, liberals were seen as people who are weak. We are now much stronger.”