United Party (South Africa)

From Freepedia

The United Party was South Africa's ruling political party between 1934 and 1948. It was formed by a merger of most of Prime Minister Barry Hertzog's National Party with the rival South African Party of Jan Smuts. The party drew support from several different racial groups, including the British, Afrikaners and Coloureds.

Hertzog led the party till 1939. In that year, Hertzog refused to commit South Africa to Britain's war effort against Nazi Germany. Many Afrikaners who had fought in the Anglo-Boer war were still alive and the atrocities committed by the British during that conflict were fresh in the national memory. Hertzog thus felt that it would be an affront to honour to force Afrikaners to fight on the side of the British enemy. Furthermore, Hertzog could see little benefit to be gained by South Africa in fighting a war that he saw as an essentially European affair.

The majority of the United Party caucus were of a different mind, however, and Hertzog resigned. Jan Smuts succeeded him and led the party and the country throughout World War II and the immediate post-war years.

Smuts and the United Party lost the 1948 election to the National Party. It was never to hold power again. Sir de Villiers Graaf replaced Smuts as party leader, a post he held until 1977. Attrition characterized his leadership years, as the party slowly declined because of electoral gerrymandering, changes to South Africa's voting laws, including the removal of the Coloureds - South Africans of mixed ancestry, who had been staunch United Party supporters - from the electoral rolls, and defections to other parties. In 1977, the United Party was renamed the New Republic Party, but a significant number of its parliamentarians refused to remain with the renamed party; some joined the anti-apartheid Progressive Federal Party and others eventually joined the ruling National Party. Elections in late 1977 left the New Republic Party gutted, with only 10 parliamentary seats, down from the 41 the United Party had held previously.

The UP's position on race relations in South Africa was a complex one; while the UP was more liberal in character than the National Party, it never clearly articulated its views on how race relations in South Africa were to proceed. Smuts himself alluded to the fact that at some unspecified point in the future, Black South Africans might be asked to share power with the White minority, provided Black politicians demonstrated their committment to 'civilized'norms of national and personal conduct. Generally, though, the UP seemed to have little difficulty in tacitly supporting apartheid. One of the reasons that the UP fared so disasterously in the 1948 was its lack of committment to one or the other policy on race relations. This stood in contrast to the National Party which was firmly and unequivocally behind the notion of preserving White superiority at all costs.

See also: List of political parties in South Africa