SOUTH AFRICA: The final demise at the weekend of the New National Party (NNP), the successor to South Africa's apartheid-era ruling party, "creates a void" that needs to be filled, according to the nation's last white president, FW de Klerk.
"I really believe that the dissolution of the New National Party creates a void in the party political scene in South Africa. We need a fairly young person without any political baggage to stand up and be counted and say, 'We are going to fill this void'," said de Klerk.
The decision to disband the NNP was approved by the party's federal council on Saturday when the motion was passed by a majority of 88 votes to two. The party will cease to exist on the certification of the results from the coming local government elections, which it will not contest.
Following the meeting, party leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk noted that the forerunner to the NNP, the apartheid-era National Party (NP), had brought development to a section of South Africa but also suffering through a system grounded on injustice.
"No party could hope to successfully atone and move ahead in the same vehicle," he said.
Indeed, the party's showing at the polls in recent elections supports Mr van Schalkwyk's theory as to why the party has so dramatically fallen from grace.
In 1999 the NNP received a million of the 16 million votes cast in the country's general election. However, its support base dropped to 257,000 votes in the 2004 elections, or just 2 per cent of the vote.
This poor result led to many of the party's top people joining the African National Congress (ANC), an unprecedented move which resulted in further divisions amongst the party's core supporters who had disagreed over power-sharing with the ANC in 1994.
Former president and NP leader Mr de Klerk has turned his back on the NNP since party members started to join the ANC last year, and he has maintained that a new party is needed to oppose the ruling ANC.
"I think there is a need to establish something to take the place of the National Party, but hopefully without the historical baggage which the National Party carried and which also played a role in its demise," said Mr de Klerk.
So what kind of party could fill the political space that Mr de Klerk believes has opened up as a result of the NNP's demise, and from which section of the population would it draw its support base?
Professor of politics at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, Tom Lodge, saw the death of the NNP as nothing more than a symbolic moment in South Africa's political history.
"It will have very little effect on the current political landscape. It's just a symbolic moment because it was the second-oldest political party in Africa, and was responsible for apartheid and the eventual transfer over to majority rule.
"Once they abandoned the white supremacists and made peace with the ANC, the party effectively fell on its own sword."
Prof Lodge added that when the NNP failed to merge successfully with the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, in 2000 - because of a clash of personalities between the two party leaders - there was no way forward left open to it.
And he was not so sure a new political party representing the Afrikaner population could succeed in the current climate.
"The majority of the extremists have opted out of the political spectrum, and those remaining are so politically inept that they would not be able to capitalise on the situation," he said.