Another step along that road was taken in late October with the collapse of the capitalist Democratic Alliance, a 16-month-old opposition formed with the merger of the New National Party (NNP) and the liberal Democratic Party (DP). The breakup registers the breadth of nonracial advances over the past seven years and the determination of millions of working people to speed up change in the former land of apartheid.

Increasing tensions have marked the alliance of the Democratic Party and the New National Party, which ran the white-minority regime and the brutal system of apartheid from 1948 until 1994, over the past months as it failed to make new inroads in building an opposition to the ANC government

In July 2000 the two parties announced they would join forces. A year earlier, during the second democratic, nonracial elections for national government, the African National Congress maintained its 66 percent parliamentary majority, despite predictions to the contrary in the big-business media, which harped on what it called the ANC's "non-delivery" of an improved standard of living for the masses of people in South Africa.

In that election, the NNP's share of the vote fell sharply, with the DP picking up most of that support. The DP campaigned on the slogan Fight Back. In South Africa, the slogan could only mean one thing: fight blacks, and stem the erosion of privileges accorded to whites.

The new party's opposition to affirmative action, its claims that the new ANC government was more corrupt than the old, the support by individual leaders for the death penalty, calls to scrap laws protecting workers rights and safety on the job, opposition to radical agrarian reform, and a host of other reactionary positions provoked unflinching opposition to the Democratic Alliance from the vast majority of workers, peasants, and the growing black middle class.

At the time of the merger, the parties announced that their principal goal was to challenge the dominance of the ANC. But a day after the Democratic Alliance came apart at the seams, NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk was singing a different tune.

He declared that his erstwhile partners "have reduced opposition politics to an angry white voice instead of engaging government on principle and with the interest of cooperative governance and loyalty to the country." The alliance's biggest mistake, he said, was that it approached opposition politics by seeking to "represent old apartheid privileges." Van Schalkwyk declared that his party should never have left the government of national unity in 1996, in which it held one of two deputy president slots and several cabinet posts. At that time it was called the National Party.

F.W. De Klerk, the former National Party leader who withdrew his followers from the government at the time, indicated his support for the NNP's move away from the Democratic Alliance, which he said would likely be "without influence and with a race label round its neck, something like Ian Smith's party after Zimbabwean independence."

After the split Van Schalkwyk announced that he sought talks with the ANC to discuss collaboration at the national, provincial, and local levels of government. The immediate issue is in the Western Cape province. In the 1999 elections, the ANC won the largest number of votes of any single party in the province, but fell short of an absolute majority. The DP and NNP formed a coalition government there. Of South Africa's nine provinces, ANC provincial governments hold office in seven. The Inkatha Freedom Party dominates the government of KwaZulu-Natal province.

In response, the ANC leadership gave the go-ahead for exploratory talks with the NNP. In an interview in the November 2 Business Day, published in Johannesburg, ANC Secretary General Kgalema Motlanthe denied rumors of a merger with the NNP, which he said has no future.

"We don't want them to be praise singers," he said. "They will criticize if they want to. But we are offering them an opportunity to play a meaningful role." He said this might mean encouraging sections of NNP supporters to see social and political questions in the country in nonracial terms, fostering the idea that the ANC is serious about a nonracial approach to politics.

A substantial percentage of the NNP's supporters, particularly in the Western Cape, are those blacks categorized by the apartheid rulers as colored. That section of the population, while facing the brutal exploitation of apartheid rule, had a few privileges relative to Africans. Working people in colored townships often had somewhat better job opportunities, education, and housing.

Both the NNP and DP have built their support among the middle class and working class in colored townships by stoking fears that progress by Africans--the vast majority of the population--will result in their own impoverishment, and the loss of homes and jobs. They have portrayed the ANC as a party that speaks only for Africans.

However, national and local elections over the past two years registered growing support for the ANC in many colored townships and rural areas.  
 
 
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