AFRICAN ELECTIONS.

Manawatu Times, Volume XLII, Issue 1736, 11 February 1921, Page 5

AFRICAN ELECTIONS.

STATE OF PARTIES. SOME KEEN CONTESTS. ’ [By Electric Cable —Copyright.) [Aust. and N Z. Cable Association.] CAPETOWN, February 9. The latest election returns are:— South African Party 54 Nationalists 27 Labour . 9 Independent The Hon. F. S. Malan (Minister or Mines and Education), the Hon. H. Burton (Minister of Railways), and Sir Thomas Watt (Minister of Public Works), were returned with good majorities, as' also was Sir T. Smart (leader of the Unionists). The country returns are very slow in coming in. Up till now they are distinctly favourable to the Government, which, in addition to its gain from Labour, has captured two Nationalist seats. v The contests between the Government supporters and the Nationalists in the country districts are unprecedentedly keen. In two cases there was a tie, and in a number of instances the margins were of the barest.

“The South African election, about half a year ago, created an unstable position which could hardly last,” says the Manchester “Guardian.” “General Smuts’ power stands on a razor’s edge with a Parliamentary strength barely equal to that of the Nationalists, the Dutch Right; he is dependent on Labour\or the Unionists, or what support he can obtain from both. Three courses were open to him. He might have decided on a second general election, but without some large. change in the issue of the preliminary party arrangements the result, if our own double f event of 1910 is any evidence, would have been pretty muclf the same. He might have tried to find a formula of reconciliation with the stiff-necked Boers under Herzog, and this he recently did without success. He may not have had much hope of compromise with men narrow, zealous, and conservative, but the attempt had to be made if only to show the general body of Dutch that he had 'made it before he had recourse to the third expedient, his formal choice of which is now announced. It amounts to the definite splitting and rending of the Dutch as a political body by the formation of a new party, in which, the principal constituents would be General Smuts’ own South African party, the Unionists, and any moderate men on the fringes of the Nationalist and the Labour forces. , The racial division which has marked South African politics is frankly abandoned, and the test becomes devotion to the Union Constitution and aversion from all forms of lawlessness and revolution.