In February 1992, he was elected to represent the Potchefstroom constituency, formerly a National Party stronghold, in the House of Assembly; the Conservatives' victory in the by-election contributed to President F. W. de Klerk's decision to hold a referendum on apartheid the following month.
Beyers was born on 24 October 1946[1] to a conservative Afrikaans family; both of his grandparents fought in the Boer War and their forebears partook in the 1838 Great Trek.
[4] In early 1992, while he was still serving as national secretary, Beyers was called in as a CP "heavyweight" to stand as the party's candidate in a parliamentary by-election in Potchefstroom in the Western Transvaal.
[7][6] The Potchefstroom by-election was directly linked to de Klerk's decision to call a whites-only referendum on apartheid the following month, which gave the NP a mandate to continue with negotiations.
[8] Beyers continued to represent the Potchefstroom constituency in the House of Assembly until the next general election, but during that period he left the CP and earned a reputation as politically "promiscuous".
[2] In 1993, Afrikaner Volksunie participated in the Multi-Party Negotiating Forum on constitutional change, but it joined forces with the CP and three conservative bantustan leaders (Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Lucas Mangope, and Oupa Gqozo) to establish the dissident Concerned South Africans Group.
Through 1993, the Volksunie's support base was diminished by the rise of the new and more ambitiously separatist Afrikaner Volksfront, and Beyers announced in early November 1993 that he would rejoin the NP.
[12] He announced that he and other white right-wing politicians, including Cassie Aucamp and Ferdi Hartzenberg, were planning to launch a new "Christian nationalist" party modelled after the NP as it had been during the early decades of apartheid, under Prime Ministers Verwoerd and D. F.