White party disbands

last updated 8 January 2015

Pretoria, South Africa

The white-supremacist party that invented apartheid voted itself out of existence this week. The National Party, which came to power in 1948 on a platform of combating the “black peril,” tried to survive after apartheid ended, in 1994, by renaming itself the New National Party. But after garnering less than 2 percent in the last election, it decided this week to disband. F.W. de Klerk, the last National Party leader of South Africa, said he hoped a new party could form that would play an opposition role “without the historical baggage.” The mostly black African National Congress is currently the dominant party, with 279 out of 400 legislative seats.