MANY people outside South Africa might think it miraculous that the National Party has survived as long as it has. After more than 40 years of white Afrikaner supremacism, brutal repression and dirty tricks, the NP could have been forgiven for slinking away.
Instead, the "Nats" have lasted nearly two years in the new multiracial South Africa, playing second fiddle in government to the communists and terrorists" of the African National Congress. The party's share of the vote has probably not slipped much from the 20 per cent it won in the first multi racial elections of 1994 and its presence in government is still deemed essential for business and investor confidence in President Nelson Mandela's new order.
Last week it officially relaunched itself as a centre right multiracial Christian Democrat party, aiming to challenge the ANC's stranglehold on the nonwhite vote and perhaps return to real power some day. Yet the fact remains that many - if not most - independent commentators still believe the party is doomed. For these prophets of failure last Friday's relaunch was grist to the mill.
The party's Nobel prize winning leader, Mr F.W. de Klerk used the occasion to describe his party as a "new vision" for a "new spiritual trek towards an unknown destination." The Nats he said, would play a leading role in redefining South African politics by unifying a majority of all South Africans in a dynamic political movement based on proven core values and Christian norms and standards".
The strategy is to initiate contacts with other parties of the right and centre in an attempt to build a credible opposition to the monolithic power of the ANC - which enjoys over 60 per cent of the popular vote before the 1999 general elections. If the ANC is not challenged before then. Mr De Klerk warns, South Africa risks becoming an undemocratic one party state.
The need for a new direction has been clear to the NP leadership for a long time. Even if the party was able to win every white, mixed race and Indian vote it would still have only 27 per cent of the electorate. In order to remain a meaningful force it must, therefore, forge contacts with other parties such as the liberal Democratic Party, the Afrikaner nationalist Freedom Front and the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party. It must also pray for an ANC split.
Even if these conditions were in place, no all white party could expect to wield real democratic power in a country that is 73 per cent black. Without a black power base the NP would lose all influence after the 1999 election when, the ANC is hinting strongly, it wants the present government of national unity to end.
But while Mr De Klerk's statement contained plenty of aspiration and rhetoric, it set out no new policies to woo black voters. According to Mr Themba Molefe, political correspondent of the Sowetan newspaper, the NP has still to grasp the fact that it cannot win black votes without drastically changing its policies and leadership.
For example, the NP remains vocally opposed to change in the present school policy, which effectively allows formerly whites only schools to retain substantial state funding while remaining centres of privilege. On issues such as tax crime, healthcare and employment, the party continues to act as the champion of a wealthy white minority.
"The question of protecting minority rights is still being interpreted by many blacks as trying to maintain the status quo of apartheid." Mr Molefe says. "The National Party still has to work very hard to fight the fact that it is still a white party, and they don't have time. They only have three years.
The very name of the National Party is hated by most blacks. It is understood Mr De Klerk is eager for a name change but a decision has been put off until after May's local elections in the Western Cape, where strong support from mixed race "coloureds" gives the NP its only provincial majority.
For other obstacles to black support Mr De Klerk had no need to look any further than the auditorium last Friday. As he spoke, he was flanked on the podium by three senior party members, all white, Afrikaans speaking males.
Among those in the audience was Mr Adriaan Vlok, law and order minister in the apartheid years of dirty tricks and third force violence. According to Mr Ivor Jenkins, director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa think tank, the presence of such controversial figures and the impending revelations from the Truth Commission into apartheid era political crime cast a deep shadow over the NP's prospects.
"The Nats will have to come up with something very drastic in terms of leadership," he says. They need strong, middle of the road, conservative, high moral tone black leaders. I don't know if they'll be able to find them."
Few observers see much prospect of the grand anti ANC coalition required by the NP survival strategy. Both the IFP and the Freedom Front still espouse ethnic policies different only in degree to the type the NP has so hurriedly abandoned. The Democratic Party caters for an English speaking white liberal elite which has always scorned the NP and differs widely from it on social policies such as abortion and the death penalty. None of these parties has much prospect of increasing its small vote.
Nor is there as much prospect of an ANC split as the Nats would like. The ANC may be a broad and ramshackle church, uniting communists with traditional chiefs, but it enjoys such overwhelming support that few serious politicians would want to leave it.
Against all these odds Mr De Klerk does have one good card to play. The centrepiece of last week's relaunch was the announcement that Mr Roelf Meyer is resigning as the coalition's minister for constitutional development to become the first secretary general of a new, more efficient party machine.
A moderate who is relatively untarnished by the sins of apartheid, Mr Meyer is seen as the new face of the National Party and his appointment confirms him as Mr De Klerk's heir presumptive. Mr Meyer is also the best man to deal with the ANC if the NP decides to go all out to have the present coalition arrangement extended beyond the next election.
By persuading Mr Meyer to resign from government and take a leading party role, Mr De Klerk has pulled off something of a coup. The NP has now put its best face forward, unfortunately for Mr De Klerk, that face still isn't black.