"If the elections lead to a coalition between the more radical parties, it will only strengthen the determination of certain rural Afrikaners (mostly descendants of Dutch) to go their own way," said Wynand Boshoff, a member of parliament and provincial leader of the FF Plus party.

Orania, a whites-only enclave accused of racism, was founded in the early 1990s after the end of apartheid with the aim of protecting the culture and language of white Afrikaners from South Africa's black majority.

Today, the town has a population of 2,800, a drop in the ocean in a country of nearly 60 million people.

In power since 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) could, according to polls, lose its absolute majority in parliament and be forced to forge alliances to form a coalition government.

On the left, this could be with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who promise radical reforms such as land redistribution and the nationalisation of key sectors of the economy. Or with uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the party of former president and ex-ANC leader Jacob Zuma.

"Orania will become more important if this coalition happens," because Afrikaners "will rightly feel that they are being marginalised to such an extent that at some point it could become existential for them," said Boshoff, 53, the grandson of assassinated apartheid-era prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd.

"It's as if people don't realise that we lost the country 30 years ago. But if the EFF or the MK are in government, suddenly they will realise that we have lost it," he said.

Located 870 kilometres (540 miles) from Cape Town, Orania lies in the vast Karoo desert on the banks of the Orange River, covering an area of 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres).

The Afrikaner party FF Plus has 10 seats in the 400-member National Assembly.

Its programme is not explicitly separatist, but it wants to scrap ANC measures to economically empower the black majority, which it deems discriminatory.

The ANC has been in power since Nelson Mandela won the country's first multiracial elections in 1994.

Recent polls suggest the ANC is set to continue its electoral decline since 2014 and could lose its outright majority in Wednesday's vote.

The ANC currently holds 230 of the 400 parliamentary seats (57.50 percent), while the centre-right liberal Democratic Alliance (DA) and the radical left EFF have 84 (20.77 percent) and 44 seats (10.79 percent) respectively. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which draws its support mainly from the Zulu ethnic group, is the fourth-largest party in parliament with 14 MPs (3.38 percent).

Read Also: Jurista. ANC governará África do Sul até 2029 com liderança alargada (Portuguese version)