Выборы в Южной Африке 1958 года: Первый всеобщий белый электорат.

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General elections were held in South Africa on 16 April 1958. The result was a victory for the National Party, now under the leadership of J. G. Strijdom after the retirement of D. F. Malan in 1954. The opposition United Party campaigned for the first time under De Villiers Graaff, who would remain party leader for two decades. The National Party won 103 seats in the House of Assembly. It was the first election in South Africa with a whites only electorate, following the removal of the Cape Qualified Franchise in the late 1950s, after the resolution of the coloured vote constitutional crisis. Coloured voters were now represented by four white MPs elected in separate constituencies, after the model introduced for native (black) voters in 1936. As these latter (NMP) seats were abolished in 1960, this was the only general election in which both separate coloured and native (Black) MPs were seated.

The Separate Representation of Voters Act 1951, had provided for coloured voters in Cape Province to be removed from the general voters rolls and placed on a separate roll. The coloured voters lost the right to participate in general roll elections and were given four (white) representative members in Parliament. The implementation of the 1951 Act was delayed in what is known as the Coloured vote constitutional crisis, due to legal arguments about whether Parliament had complied with the requirement for a two thirds majority in joint session, before it could remove the coloured voters from the general roll. Eventually legislation to change the size and electoral system for the Senate was enacted, which the courts accepted as enabling the 1951 Act to be validated by the constitutionally required margin. The Coloured Representative Members were elected, for the first time, on 3 April 1958, for a term expiring with the next dissolution of Parliament. Four supporters of the United Party were elected to fill the new seats.

The general election, for 156 seats in the 12th Union Parliament, was the first in South African history when only voters classified as white took part. In the eleven previous general elections, the Cape Province and Natal general electoral roll had included some black (until 1938 in the Cape), Asian (until 1948) and coloured electors. The election saw the collapse of the South African Labour Party which lost all 5 of its seats and whose vote dropped from almost 35,000 votes in 1953 to 2,670 votes in 1958. The drop in support is largely attributed to the party leader Alex Hepple's growing outspokenness in opposition to apartheid and his co operation with the African National Congress, positions which were not supported at the time by white workers who were the bulk of the Labour Party's electorate. Moreover, the party did not repeat its electoral alliance with the United Party, and its sole two candidates in the election Hepple and Leo Lovell both finished in distant third places, losing their seats to United Party candidates. A total of 24 seats were uncontested, all of which were won by the United Party.