Conservative Party (South Africa)

Conservative Party of South Africa Konserwatiewe Party van Suid-Afrika
Leader	Andries Treurnicht 1982–1993 Ferdinand Hartzenberg 1993–2004
Founded	1982
Dissolved	2004
Merged into	Freedom Front
Headquarters	Cape Town
Ideology	Conservatism Separate Development Afrikaner nationalism Paleoconservatism White nationalism
Political position	Far-right
Website
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Politics of South Africa Political parties Elections

The Conservative Party of South Africa (Konserwatiewe Party van Suid-Afrika in Afrikaans) was a hard right party that wished to conserve many aspects of apartheid in the system's final decade, and formed the official opposition in the white-only House of Assembly in the last seven years of minority rule. It declined quickly after apartheid ended, before being merged with the Freedom Front in 2004.

It was formed in 1982 by 23 MPs from the ruling National Party who opposed Prime Minister PW Botha's reforms to apartheid and power sharing proposals, which they saw as a threat to white minority rule, and the racial segregation known as Separate Development. Led by Andries Treurnicht, a former Dutch Reformed Church minister popularly known as 'Doctor No'. The CP's English-language programme booklets from 1987-89 stated that the party was established "to continue the policy of self-determination after the [NP] government had exchanged self-determination" (something the CP described as an "infallible policy"), for power-sharing. It drew support from white South Africans, mostly Boer/Afrikaners in the rural heartlands of South Africa.

It became the official opposition in the whites-only House of Assembly of South Africa in the elections of 6 May 1987, when it surpassed the liberal Progressive Federal Party, winning 550,000 votes. Donald Simpson, writing in the South African newspaper, The Star, went as far as to predict that the National Party would lose the next election and that the Conservative Party would become the new government of South Africa.

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