For its duration, it was the main parliamentary opposition to apartheid, instead advocating power-sharing in South Africa through a federal constitution.

[1] Its best known parliamentarian was however Helen Suzman, who was for many years the only member of the whites-only House of Assembly to speak out unequivocally against the apartheid regime.

[2] South Africa's apartheid laws initially limited the party's membership to the country's whites, from which it drew support mainly from liberal English speakers.

But over the weekend of 3 September 1979, on the behest of Gordon Waddell, the PFP would hold a special congress in Johannesburg to elect a new leader, citing such reasons as Eglin's "uninspired" parliamentary performance, which allowed the ruling Nationalists to recover from the Muldergate slush fund scandal; his "indiscreet" contacts with black US politicians Don McHenry and Andy Young, whom many South Africans regarded as enemies of the country; and the party's severe defeats in three recent Parliamentary by-elections.

[citation needed] This electoral blow led many of the PFP's leaders to question the value of participating in the whites-only parliament, and some of its MPs left to form the New Democratic Movement (NDM).