BY T.J. FIGUEROA
PRETORIA, South Africa - Fourteen parties will contest South
Africa's second nonracial democratic election on June 2. For
workers and peasants in this country of 40 million people, the
central question on the agenda is maintaining and broadening
the democratic conquests won in the battle against the racist
system of apartheid, and expanding the pace and scope of
economic and social transformation.
The first nonracial election held in April 1994, marked a turning point in South Africa's democratic revolution after decades of mass struggle and subsequent negotiations that began in the early 1990s between national liberation organizations and the apartheid ruling class. The 1994 poll registered the burial of white-minority rule. The Government of National Unity took office, in which the majority party, the African National Congress, shared the cabinet with the National Party, which subsequently quit the cabinet, and Inkatha Freedom Party. The five-year coalition arrangement ends this year.
Most working people see the ruling African National Congress (ANC) as the only party that represents their interests. Recent opinion polls credit the ANC with 62 percent support among those registered to vote.
The ANC standard-bearer is the organization's president, Thabo Mbeki, who is also the country's deputy president. South African president Nelson Mandela will retire from government after the poll.
The ANC is campaigning for a two-thirds majority of seats in parliament, or 67 percent of the vote, which would give the ANC the ability to amend the constitution. It garnered 63 percent of the vote in 1994. The organization "views the attainment of an overwhelming ANC majority as crucial to continuing - and accelerating - the process of reconstruction and development," said its secretary-general Kgalema Motlanthe.
The ANC campaign slogan is "Together, in every sector, fighting for change." In its election manifesto the party defends democratic conquests registered in the country's new constitution. The document reviews advances in providing basic necessities such as housing, water, and electricity to millions of working people. The organization's leadership is committed to using a large percentage of the national budget to provide such basic needs and to advance land reform, affirmative action, and other social measures to abolish South Africa's racist legacy.
Large rallies in recent months in townships and rural areas have confirmed popular support for the ANC. Millions of working people, among them women and youth in urban and rural areas, are more confident today in advancing their rights as a result of democratic space won through struggle and entrenched in the constitution. They have participated in strikes and skirmishes, clashes to abolish racist practices in schools and workplaces, and struggles over land and housing throughout the country.
Defenders of white privilege
"The masses are telling us that the white minority still
wants to defend its privileges," Mandela told an audience in
Johannesburg on March 8. He said he had been told that
opposition parties were important in a democracy, but the
opposition had played "no useful role whatsoever" in
transforming South Africa.
This remark captures the essence of the two principal opposition parties - the New National Party (NNP, formerly the National Party that ran apartheid from 1948) and the Democratic Party (DP).
The two parties, both of which have representatives in parliament, have loudly opposed virtually every step taken by the ANC government. Crime and job losses since 1994 are the fault of the ANC, they claim. They have opposed affirmative action, health care reforms to enable greater numbers of people to receive medical care, called for a reintroduction of the death penalty, and denounced actions by fighters aiming to advance working-class struggles. The NNP directs its appeal to whites and those classified under apartheid as "colored" - a section of the black population who were allowed privileges in comparison to Africans in the past. As part of the party's makeover, it fielded a list of candidates nationally of whom nearly half are black. NNP election posters proclaim: "Hang killers and rapists."
The DP has declared it seeks to become the largest opposition group in parliament and is trying to harness white middle class rage and fear over loss of privileges. This liberal capitalist party has accepted growing numbers of well-known rightists into its ranks.
Rightists more isolated
Among the tangible victories over the past five years is that
rightist and bourgeois nationalist forces, who threatened large-
scale violence against the democratic revolution, have been
isolated.
While thousands of people are expected to vote for parties such as the right-wing Freedom Front, which has members in parliament and is led by former apartheid general Constand Viljoen, the concept of an Afrikaner "volkstaat," or mini- apartheid homeland, is cherished by fewer and fewer Afrikaners. "I wish that I could go to those meetings where Constand Viljoen speaks to the TV cameras and ask him, `who says you speak for Afrikaners? You don't speak for me,'" said an Afrikaner worker here, who asked not be named.
The rightist Afrikaner Resistance Movement, led by Eugene TerréBlanche, which formerly mobilized thousands of members in arms and carried out bombings prior to the 1994 poll, has all but disappeared as an organized entity. In early May, TerréBlanche, seeking to avoid jail, applied to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for amnesty.
There are pockets of rightists, however, including those with connections in the police and army, who may lash out. Police in Gauteng province announced on May 12 that they had discovered several large arms caches that right-wingers were planning to use to disrupt the elections.
The Inkatha Freedom Party, led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, minister of home affairs in the current government, is also contesting the poll. Inkatha, which was responsible for many bloody attacks on working people in KwaZulu-Natal province up through 1994, is now focusing on getting re-elected. Political violence has declined sharply in the province, and ANC leaders are campaigning in what were previously considered "no-go" areas in rural areas.