De Klerk, Party Quit Coalition

CAPE TOWN, South Africa, (May 9) – Deputy President Frederik W. de Klerk announced today that he and his white-led National Party are quitting South Africa's post-apartheid unity government to become a true opposition in Parliament.

The departure of de Klerk and six ministers, set for June 30, marks a dramatic realignment of President Nelson Mandela's multiracial national unity cabinet two years after he was elected South Africa's leader in the country's first all-races election. It came only a day after passage of a permanent post-apartheid constitution guaranteeing a system of civil rights and parliamentary democracy.

Both de Klerk and Mandela described the National Party's departure as a move that will help normalize multi-party politics in the new system. But it ruptures Mandela's carefully crafted coalition, intended to bring together blacks and whites polarized by years of the white minority's apartheid system of racial separation, and it opened the possibility that South Africa, for the first time, could have an executive fully controlled by black-majority parties.

The unstable South African currency, the rand, has dropped dramatically since Wednesday, when de Klerk said his party might withdraw. But analysts said they expect the rand to stabilize. Mandela said his government's fiscal and political policies will not change and that de Klerk's departure "recognizes that our young democracy has come of age."

At a news conference where his party faithful cheered him on, de Klerk wished Mandela's executive well, said his government is functioning effectively and tried to reassure the country and its allies of his party's continued participation in politics. His party will retain its 99 seats in the 490-member Parliament.

"We are not taking this decision in a negative spirit. . . . We are not sour," he said. "We believe that the development of a strong and vigilant opposition is essential for the maintenance and promotion of genuine multi-party democracy. . . . We have reached a natural watershed in the transformation of our society."

De Klerk is one of two deputy presidents in an interim unity government cobbled together after the April 1994 elections. In the intervening two years, that government has brought the country from white-minority rule to democracy.

But de Klerk, the last president under apartheid, called it "unnatural" to remain in a unity cabinet slated to become obsolete in a few years. Under the new constitution passed on Wednesday by Parliament, the unity cabinet system will end after the 1999 elections. A party winning a parliamentary majority in that race will be able to appoint its own cabinet or voluntarily enter another unity coalition. Although the National Party agreed to this strict majority-rule system in voting for the new constitution, it did so under protest.

De Klerk has had difficult personal and political relations with Mandela for years. The two men, one representing a discredited, racist system of government, the other representing the aspirations of the nation's black majority, were chained together by their converging desires for an end to race conflict and by the moment in history over which they presided.

But the new political lineup here left de Klerk's Nationalists with a dilemma: how to participate in a unity government while trying to be an opposition party with credible appeal to its largely white constituents.

De Klerk has repeatedly warned, even as recently as Wednesday, that the National Party would one day quit the government. But the timing of the move and today's surprise announcement appeared to catch Mandela off guard. At a breakfast with journalists, before de Klerk had phoned him, Mandela said the loss of his major partner in the unity government would be "regrettable."

Later in the day, after de Klerk informed him of the decision, Mandela called a news conference at which he thanked de Klerk for his "important role in ensuring this smooth transition," but also cautioned the Nationalists against returning to their apartheid roots.

Among the most contentious issues that nearly scuttled an agreement on the new constitution was the Nationalists' failed insistence on constitutional protection for single-language schools in which Afrikaner students, descendants of early white settlers, could continue to study, segregated from others, in their own language.

The de Klerk departure leaves Thabo Mbeki, a leader of the ruling African National Congress who is Mandela's presumed presidential heir, as the sole deputy president.

Speculation arose that Mandela might reach down to the next-largest party in Parliament -- the Inkatha Freedom Party -- to find a second deputy president. But Mandela said Inkatha's size makes its leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, "not entitled to the position of second deputy president."

Inkatha, also a black-led party, holds 48 seats in Parliament. No announcements were made today of who will fill the six minister and three deputy posts to be vacated by the National Party.

Government here takes on an odd political configuration with the National Party's imminent exit. Minus its Nationalist members, Mandela's cabinet will consist of 18 ministers from the ANC and three from Inkatha.

But the ANC and Inkatha, which were ideological foes during the fight against apartheid, continue to have a distressed political relationship. Inkatha, which holds a legislative majority in KwaZulu-Natal Province, walked out of the Constitutional Assembly last year in a dispute with the ANC over provincial powers. Although supporters of the two parties are fighting one another back in the province, Inkatha said today that its position in government was unchanged.