Belgium

Case notes

Flemish Bloc/ Flemish Interest

The Flemish Blok (Vlaams Blok, VB) started in the late 1970s as a coalition of small parties who had splintered from the conserve People’s Union. For almost a decade it made no sizeable impact on Belgian politics until its first breakout success in the 1991 elections. Around this time it established itself as a radical right wing party representing the Flemish community in Belgium. After being sued by the official anti-racism body in Belgium, it changed its name to the Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang) while retaining its organisation and ideology (Jagers and Walgrave 2007, 320). After declining consistently since 2007, it made a strong comeback in the 2019 election.

According to de Lange and Akkerman (de Lange and Akkerman 2012, 31) the party’s ideology is built on an opposition to three groups supposedly hostile to the interests of the Flemish people: immigrants, people from Wallonia (French speaking Belgians), and the political elites from across the country. In 1992 the party published a seventy-point programme which, among other things, demanded that immigrants be returned to their country of origin (Pauwels 2013, 89; de Lange and Akkerman 2012, 28). It has repeated other forms of nativist rhetoric, such as its slogan “own people first” (Coffé, Heyndels, and Vermeir 2007, 143), and the repeated assertion that Muslim and Eastern European immigrants are involved in crimes at an “alarming” rate (Coffé 2005, 77) (OTH_IMMIGRANT, OTH_ETHNIC= 3). It has branded all other parties as, among other insults, a “political mafia”, and alleged that it is supported by a cultural elite in high society (Pauwels 2013, 90; de Lange and Akkerman 2012, 32; De Cleen 2016, 76) (OTH_POLCLASS = 3). Aside from these points, the party also favours harsh law and order policies and socially conservative policies aimed at encouraging women to have more children and outlawing abortion (Billiet and Witte 1995, 186). According to Pauwels (Pauwels 2013, 90) “economic issues are less important” to the party, and other than a general welfare Chauvanism, its position on economic policy is generally unclear. For this reason we have coded it FR on LRPOSITION and 1 on OTH_ECONOMIC. While the party is generally considered to be Eurosceptic, we have not seen evidence that this stance is important enough to register on the OTH_FOREIGN variable (= 1).

Many scholars and commentators have alleged that the party is a threat to democracy in Belgium (Meijen, Raube, and Wouters 2023). Evidence for this lies in its wish to radically reform and centralise the Belgian state (abolishing provinces), develop a system of majoritarian referenda to decide policy, and its repeated attacks on media criticism (it calls such criticism a “witch hunt”, and has a history of bringing legal action against critical journalists (de Lange and Akkerman 2012, 33–35)). There is clearly a lot behind this assessment, but given that the party does not condone violence, nor question the ley of elections (as far as we’ve seen) we have coded it 1 on LIBDEMNORMS. According to some (de Lange and Akkerman 2012, 32; Pauwels 2013, 94) the party is not dominated by its leader. However the central position of Filip Dewinter in party for many years has led some to allege that is somewhat leader-centric. We have coded it 1 on CHARISMA, but this should be confirmed. As we have seen no evidence that the leaders of the party served in government, we have coded the party 1 on INSIDER.

Not included

New Flemish Alliance (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, N-VA) is a more moderate Flemish nationalist party compared with the VB, and has arguably done well by attracting VB voters who think that the cordon sanitaire against the party makes voting for it superfluous (Pauwels and Haute 2017, 2). N-VA has been a challenge for populist scholars: while it has often used anti-establishment and ethno-nationalist rhetoric (Pauwels 2013, 86), it is not an anti-system party like VB, and each of the variables most associated with right wing populism (OTH_POLCLASS, OTH_IMMIGRANTS, and OTH_ETHNIC) are notably softer in the N-VAs rhetoric than a typical populist party by our definition. Leader Bart De Wever has sought to clearly distinguish the party from VB’s nativism: “We strive for an inclusive citizenship that is acquirable for everyone, even for foreigners. That is inconceivable for the VB” (Maly 2016, 271). For these reasons, several populist scholars have studied the party but concluded that it should not be called populist (Pauwels 2013; Van Kessel 2015, 37). There are two other populist parties of note since 1980 that have not past the 5% threshold. List Dedecker is a charisma-based neo-liberal populist party but only peaked at 4% in 2007. The Wallonian Front National, seen as a kind of French-speaking equivalent to the VB, has also performed poorly.

References

Billiet, Jaak, and Hans De Witte. 1995. ‘Attitudinal Dispositions to Vote for a “New” Extreme Right-Wing Party: The Case of “Vlaams Blok”’. European Journal of Political Research 27 (2): 181–202. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.1995.tb00635.x.

Coffé, Hilde. 2005. ‘Do Individual Factors Explain the Different Success of the Two Belgian Extreme Right Parties’. Acta Politica 40 (1): 74–93. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500078.

Coffé, Hilde, Bruno Heyndels, and Jan Vermeir. 2007. ‘Fertile Grounds for Extreme Right-Wing Parties: Explaining the Vlaams Blok’s Electoral Success’. Electoral Studies 26 (1): 142–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2006.01.005.

De Cleen, Benjamin. 2016. ‘The Party of the People versus the Cultural Elite: Populism and Nationalism in Flemish Radical Right Rhetoric about Artists’. JOMEC Journal, no. 9: 70–91.

Jagers, Jan, and Stefaan Walgrave. 2007. ‘Populism as Political Communication Style: An Empirical Study of Political Parties’ Discourse in Belgium’. European Journal of Political Research 46 (April): 319–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00690.x.

Lange, S. L. de, and T. Akkerman. 2012. Populist Parties in Belgium: A Case of Hegemonic Liberal Democracy? CambridgeCambridge University Press. https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=844b98f2-c427-46ce-abe0-0c6dabe1649b.

Maly, Ico. 2016. ‘“Scientific” Nationalism: N-VA and the Discursive Battle for the Flemish Nation’. Nations and Nationalism 22 (April): 266–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12144.

Meijen, Jens, Kolja Raube, and Jan Wouters. 2023. ‘Protector of the People or Enemy of Democracy?: Vlaams Belang’s Anti-Pluralist Discourse and Institutional Barriers in the Flemish Political System’. In Populist Parties and Democratic Resilience: A Cross-National Analysis of Populist Parties’ Impact on Democratic Pluralism in Europe, edited by Ben Crum and Alvaro Oleart, 101–19. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pauwels, Teun. 2013. ‘Belgium: Decline of National Populism?’ In Exposing the Demagogues: Right-Wing and National Populist Parties in Europe, edited by Karsten Grabow and Florian Hartleb, 81–104. Brussels: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

Pauwels, Teun, and Emilie Haute. 2017. ‘Caught between Mainstreaming and Radicalisation: Tensions inside the Populist Vlaams Belang in Belgium’. EUROPP (blog). 11 January 2017. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/01/11/tensions-inside-vlaams-belang-belgium/.

Van Kessel, Stijn. 2015. Populist Parties in Europe: Agents of Discontent? Springer.