Prime Minister
Prime Minister Daniel Malan announced his retirement from politics following the NP's success in the elections of 1953. In the succession debate that followed Malan's retirement, N.C. Havenga, Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges and Verwoerd were potential successors. The strongest candidate J.G. Strijdom eventually was nominated Prime Minister.
Verwoerd gradually gained popularity with the Afrikaner electorate and continued to expand his political support. With his overwhelming constituency victory in the 1958 election and the death shortly thereafter of Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom, Verwoerd was appointed by the Governor-General to organise a Government as Prime Minister.
Read more about this topic: Hendrik Verwoerd
Famous quotes related to prime minister:
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“No woman in my time will be Prime Minister or Chancellor or Foreign Secretary—not the top jobs. Anyway I wouldn’t want to be Prime Minister. You have to give yourself 100%.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)
“One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)