Irish Examiner view: F W de Klerk and the long walk to freedom

Perhaps, in some ways, the story of South Africa might serve to inform the next stages of this island’s constitutional development

The late F W de Klerk, who oversaw the end of South Africa's country’s white minority rule, said at the time that in the new South Africa which he helped to forge “the positives outweighed the negatives”. AP Photo/Sasa Kralj, file

The death this week of FW de Klerk, the last white, and segregationist, president of South Africa, is a reminder that, while it often requires a charismatic leader to implement transformational political change, that it usually takes two to make a deal.

Thus it was that Nelson Mandela could not have completed his “long walk to freedom” from prisoner on Robben Island to international statesman and father of the “Rainbow Nation” without the ostensibly conservative De Klerk acting as usher to a transition that many in the National Party that he led from 1989 to 1997 found impossible to contemplate.