A fight is on for political scraps after South Africa's former apartheid party announced its demise over the weekend, almost a century after it was founded to promote white supremacist rule.
New National Party (NNP) leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced a merger with the governing African National Congress (ANC), the former liberation movement that it fought for decades in a brutal campaign of repression.
The announcement effectively means the end of the apartheid party, which was established in 1914 as the National Party (NP) and ruled for four decades until 1994, when it lost to the ANC in South Africa's first multi-racial elections. Van Schalkwyk has urged members to follow suit and join the ANC, which the NP banned in 1960 and which took up an armed struggle a year later against white minority rule.
But other opposition parties are speaking out, also urging members of the NNP -- which will formally cease to exist in September next year -- to make their new political home with them.
"South Africa now faces a clear choice between the ANC and the DA (Democratic Alliance)," said opposition leader Tony Leon. "In this contest, every vote counts," he added.
Pieter Mulder of the small, conservative and white Freedom Front Plus party called the NNP's decision "an embarrassment for anybody who has ever been associated with the party."
The Freedom Front Plus called on the NNP's seven members of parliament "to retain some of their political integrity and cross over to the Freedom Front instead of the ANC," Mulder told the SAPA news agency. Observers have also said other small parties, like the newly established Independent Democrats would benefit from the NNP's demise. For South Africa's struggling opposition, the NNP's decision to join those it could not beat bodes ill for democracy and political diversity.
"The excuse the NNP has given to justify this merger -- that the debate about the future of South Africa can only take place inside the ANC -- is absolutely misplaced," said Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille.
"Parties do not need to be swallowed by the ANC in order to debate the future of our country. The debate about the future of South Africa must take place amongst all South Africans including many who are outside the ANC," she said.
Despite praise from President Thabo Mbeki, who called the move to the ANC "historic," the decision has been greeted with much scepticism, with many accusing Van Schalkwyk of selling out his party for a cabinet post.
"Van Schalkwyk's defection to the ANC is a ploy to keep his cabinet job," said the Johannesburg-based Business Day newspaper in its satirical back-page column "The Third Umpire."
The Afrikaans newspaper Beeld said it believed Van Schalkwyk would serve a successful term as environment and tourism minister in Mbeki's cabinet.
"But chances are rather that he would be remembered for the ignominious end to the NNP.
"It's an ignominious end because it looks disturbingly like a career move by Van Schalkwyk and his lieutenants rather than somebody serving a representative democracy," the paper said.
The NNP's decision followed a disastrous showing in elections in April that saw support for the party dwindle to less than two percent.
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