Support
The National Party won a majority of parliamentary seats in all elections during the Apartheid era. Its popular vote record was more mixed: While it won the popular vote with a comfortable margin in most general elections, the National Party carried less than 50% of the electorate in 1948, 1953, 1961, and 1989. In 1977, the National Party got its best-ever result in the elections with support of 64.8% of the white voters and 134 seats in parliament out of 165. After this the party's support declined as a proliferation of right wing parties siphoned off important segments of its traditional voter base.
Throughout its reign, the party's support came mainly from Afrikaners, but Anglo-Africans were courted by and increasingly voted for the National Party after 1960.
Read more about this topic: National Party (South Africa)
Famous quotes containing the word support:
“An ordinary man will work every day for a year at shoveling dirt to support his body, or a family of bodies; but he is an extraordinary man who will work a whole day in a year for the support of his soul. Even the priests, men of God, so called, for the most part confess that they work for the support of the body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The habit of arguing in support of atheism, whether it be done from conviction or in pretense, is a wicked and impious practice.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)