Ex-Party of Apartheid Folds, Agrees to Merger With Main ANC Rival

The political party that created apartheid, imprisoned Nelson Mandela and later negotiated a peaceful transition to black-majority rule in South Africa has called it quits after 86 years, conceding that it cannot go it alone in the racially mixed nation.

Leaders of the New National Party confirmed Sunday that they have agreed to a merger with the country’s main opposition party, the Democratic Party, under the name Democratic Alliance. The New Nationalists will exist in name only until 2004, when the current term of Parliament ends.

The new coalition will be headed by Democratic Party leader Tony Leon, with New National Party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk as deputy. The merger, agreed upon in principle Saturday, follows weeks of intense negotiations--including some nasty name-calling by both Leon and Van Schalkwyk--during which Van Schalkwyk ultimately consented to what analysts described as a friendly takeover.

“It offers the National Party a very graceful demise,” said Lawrence Schlemmer, director of Markdata, a Johannesburg-based polling and research company. “There will be a complete amalgamation of the two parties. I can see no other alternative.”

The merger would bring to a formal close one of the most racist chapters in 20th century African history. The Nationalists, under former clergyman and newspaper editor Daniel F. Malan, came to power in 1948 after reinstituting a “purified” version of the party, which had strayed from its strict Afrikaner roots by cooperating with the English-based South African Party before World War II.

Malan’s party held firmly on to power for 46 years, imposing measures favoring Afrikaners and other whites that would ultimately turn South Africa into an international pariah state. In the belief that races should be kept apart, the government moved millions of black South Africans from white areas to nominally independent black homelands.

“The often haphazard segregation of the past 300 years was to be consolidated into a monolithic system that was diabolical in its detail, inescapable in its reach and overwhelming in its power,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography. “From the moment of the Nationalists’ election, we knew that our land would henceforth be a place of tension and strife.”

A Resounding Defeat in Multiracial Elections

Only in 1990, when President Frederik W. de Klerk released Mandela and lifted the ban on black liberation movements, did the party irreversibly abandon its apartheid policies. Four years later, the party was resoundingly defeated by the African National Congress, or ANC, in the country’s first multiracial elections.

It has floundered in search of supporters and an identity ever since.

After quitting an ANC-led government of national unity in 1996, the party lost most of its conservative white voters to the Democrats and relied on a cluster of mixed-race supporters in Western Cape province to keep its political fortunes afloat.

In 1997, one of its most promising leaders, Roelf Meyer, was forced to resign after he suggested that the party disband and start over from scratch. In 1998, the party’s name was changed from the National Party to the New National Party, but the “Bad Nats” reputation stuck throughout.

“If the Democratic Party can sleep in the same bed as the party of old South Africa--the New National Party in this regard--then their philosophy of being democratic was just a farce,” said Nomfanelo Kota-Mayosi, spokeswoman for the ANC. “We think the alliance is based on maintaining white privilege and white interests. Why else would they be interested in joining a party that has committed so many atrocities in the history of this country?”

The merger announcement came one year after the Nationalists were trounced in parliamentary and provincial elections that saw the ANC strengthen its grip on power and the Democratic Party jump into second place as the official opposition.

The Nationalists’ support countrywide fell from 20% in 1994 to 8% in 1999, and in the party’s traditional base in the Western Cape, it held on to the provincial government only through a power-sharing agreement with the Democrats.

Leon, who hopes to bring other opposition parties into the Democratic Alliance, pushed for the merger agreement well in advance of nationwide municipal elections in November. The two parties will now be able to concentrate on defeating the ANC instead of fighting each other.

“The initiative . . . is good news for multi-party democracy in South Africa,” De Klerk said.

New Coalition Brings Together Past Enemies

Ironically, the new coalition brings together bitter enemies from the past: The Democratic Party is the successor to the party of Helen Suzman, for many years the lone member of Parliament to oppose the Nationalist policies of racial separation during the apartheid era.

Suzman said Sunday that South Africa has changed so profoundly in the past decade that the old divisions have become meaningless.

Nonetheless, she said, “I grit my teeth at the thought of having an ex-Nat as deputy [leader]. I will keep my beady eyes on this thing.”