Botha's Setback

He wins--but reforms may lose

In South African elections there is never any doubt about the outcome. The all-white electorate troops to the polls and votes overwhelmingly for the Afrikaner-dominated, white-supremacist National Party, just as it has seven times since 1948. Last week's parliamentary election seemed to be no exception: the Nationalists ran up a familiar landslide among the 1.5 million voters, winning 131 of the 165 seats at stake. But this time there were significant differences. There was an overriding issue--the extent and pace of racial reform. There were defections from the ruling party, to both the left and right.

And that combination produced the worst electoral setback the National Party has received in its 33 years in power.

The 2 1/2-year-old government of Prime Minister P.W. Botha has been edging cautiously toward reform of South Africa's rigid system of enforced racial separation. It has advocated the abolition or modification of many so-called petty apartheid regulations, such as the hated pass laws that restrict blacks' movement, and those forbidding racial mixing in public places such as restaurants and sports facilities. Botha has also floated vague promises of better conditions for the country's blacks and has granted some tangible concessions: legalized black labor unions and increased spending on black education. Limited as such reforms have been, they are enough to enrage and frighten many whites.

The major right-wing challenge to Botha came from the twelve-year-old Herstigte (Reformed) Nasionale Party, which strongly advocates continued white privilege, black subjection and rigid racial segregation. Though the H.N.P. was unable once again to gain a single parliamentary seat in the election, its adherents more than quintupled their vote totals, to 191,000, and cut painfully into National Party majorities in many districts. H.N.P. Leader Jaap Marais, for example, challenged Nationalist Andries Treurnicht, the political boss of the Transvaal, and came within 1,500 votes of unseating him.

At the same time the moderate Progressive Federal Party (P.F.P.) attracted voters who regard Botha's cautious moves as a series of improvised compromises that will neither placate blacks nor ultimately prevent armed confrontation with them. P.F.P. Leader Frederick van Zyl Slabbert called Botha "an illusionary figure of reform" and his promises "vague mumbo jumbo." The P.F.P. gained nine seats in the new parliament, bringing its total to 26. They also dealt the Nationalists their worst single blow, defeating Minister of Industries Dawie de Villiers in his Cape Town constituency. It was the first time an incumbent National Party minister had failed to be reelected.

Throughout his campaign, Botha concentrated on limiting the challenge from the right. He emphasized his hard-line anti-Communist foreign policy, recalling the capture of a Soviet spy last year, and the suspension of preferential trade relations with neighboring Marxist-led Zimbabwe in March. He also played on the considerable comfort the Nationalists have derived from their hopes of rapprochement with the U.S., as manifested by such gestures as Foreign Minister Roelof Botha's forthcoming visit to Washington later this month. That process has been helped along by U.S. participation, with Britain and France, in vetoes of U.N.

Security Council resolutions calling for comprehensive sanctions against South Africa for foot dragging on Namibian independence.

On the domestic front, although Botha reiterated his pledge to accommodate all "legitimate personal and group aspirations," he devoted more attention to explaining what he would not do for blacks than on elaborating his earlier promises.

He ruled out the possibility that blacks could ever own property in white urban areas. One of his ministers assured audiences that the government still spends eight times as much on educating a white child as on a black. Even so, many National Party rallies were poorly attended, and Botha and other campaigners were subjected to severe heckling by right-wing rowdies. In the end, the National Party suffered a 7% decline in its popular vote total. Trying to put the best face on the election results, Botha claimed to be satisfied. "We have enough public support to continue undaunted with our task" of limited social change, he told a post-election gathering. But the defection of so many Nationalist voters seemed likely to slow even further the already snail-like pace of racial reform.

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