United Party (South Africa)
연합당 (남아프리카)
The ruling party of the Union of South Africa formed in December 1934 by merging Hertzog’s National Party with Smuts’s South African Party. It governed until 1948, drew support from white English speakers, Afrikaners and Coloureds, and was regarded as more moderate on race than the National Party, which stood for white supremacy. After losing the 1948 election to the National Party it was the official opposition for 29 years until it dissolved in 1977.
In depth
According to the Afrikaans source, the United Party grew out of the coalition between J. B. M. Hertzog and Jan Smuts amid the Great Depression (1929–1933) and the gold-standard crisis. In February 1933 the two parties agreed to a coalition in which each supplied six ministers, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts as his deputy, and in the May 1933 election coalition candidates won 138 of 150 seats. On 5 December 1934 a joint congress in Bloemfontein resolved to merge the two parties, creating the United South African National Party, the United Party for short. D. F. Malan, however, refused to join and formed the “Purified National Party”, while some pro-British members of the old South African Party formed Stallard’s Dominion Party.
On 4 September 1939, when Parliament defeated Hertzog’s motion for neutrality in the Second World War by 80 votes to 67, Hertzog resigned as prime minister and party leader, and Smuts succeeded him and took South Africa into the war on the Allied side. The United Party government directed wartime industrial and military mobilisation. In the 1948 election the UP won more votes than the National Party but trailed it in seats, 65 to 70, and lost power to the alliance of the National Party and the Afrikaner Party, with Malan becoming prime minister. The English source notes that the National Party went on to implement apartheid.
After Smuts died in 1950, J. G. N. Strauss became leader, followed in 1956 by De Villiers Graaff. The party waged and lost a six-year constitutional struggle against the National Party government’s removal of Coloured voters from the common roll, and campaigned unsuccessfully against a republic in the whites-only referendum of 1960. Several factions broke away to the left and right, notably the Progressive Party in 1959 and Harry Schwarz’s Reform Party in 1975. The English source judges that the UP opposed apartheid as a system but favoured continued white minority rule.
In 1976 Graaff launched a “Save South Africa” campaign for a new broad-based opposition party. On 28 June 1977 the United Party and the Democratic Party each resolved to dissolve, and on 29 June the New Republic Party was founded. MPs who rejected the plan were expelled or left for the South African Party or the Progressive Federal Party. The Afrikaans source notes that at its dissolution the UP still had the largest vote after the National Party, and that the only party to benefit from its dissolution was the National Party.