Plans to resurrect the "National Party of Malan and Verwoerd" have been dismissed by the New National Party as a doomed attempt by political no-hopers to blow life into the terminally ill Conservative Party.
The key figure in the initiative is Andries Beyers, a former MP who joined the NNP from the CP during the 1990s, it was reported at the weekend.
Other figures involved in the plan are former NNP MP Willie Lemmer, Afrikaner Eenheidsbeweging leader and MP Cassie Aucamp, and CP leader Dr Ferdi Hartzenberg.
Both Beyers and Lemmer have resigned from the NNP in protest against the party's alliance with the DP.
Beyers, who has not been active in politics since the general election last year, said he would now devote himself to the establishment of a new party along the lines of the National Party under HF Verwoerd and DF Malan, prime ministers in the heyday of apartheid.
The new party would be a "Christian nationalist" party without the old NP's apartheid baggage, Beyers said.
But NNP spokesperson Andre Gaum said on Sunday that an old-style Nationalist party, such as that envisaged by Beyers, had no political future.
The CP was prominent as a right-wing opposition in the previous whites-only parliament but gradually disappeared from the scene after the 1994 election, in which it did not take part.
Gaum said Beyers' proposed new party reflected out-of-date right-wing ideas.
"It is light-years removed from the realities of South African politics and would not get no support. Voters realise that their only option is to support a party like the Democratic Alliance, which is a real alternative to the ANC."