The beaming far right leader who aims to split Belgium in two strode into the campaign rally to rapturous cheers, with a smoke machine set off to add to the drama.
Some 2,000 supporters of the anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang party had gathered in the port city of Antwerp for a rally a week out from the bumper day of elections in Belgium this weekend. Alongside European Parliament elections the country is also electing representatives on Sunday to fill its federal and regional parliaments.
The far right Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) is on course to become the biggest party in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking half of the country. The party has said if it takes power in the regional parliament it will push for Flanders to break away from the rest of Belgium, namely the southern French-speaking Wallonia region.
Taking to the stage in Antwerp, party leader Tom Van Grieken said Vlaams Belang was on the verge of upending the political system. He told cheering supporters that if Geert Wilders’s far right Freedom Party could break through and enter government in the Netherlands, Vlaams Belang could do the same.
Machteld Fitters, a retired cleaner from Antwerp, was at the rally wearing a hand knitted yellow jumper with the party logo on the back. “Vlaams Belang stand for the Flemish people… here is too much migration,” she said
The elections in Belgium – in common with polls across Europe this weekend – are expected to see a further shift towards the political extremes both right and left, putting parties in the centre under pressure. “Some people don’t have any confidence in the traditional political parties and they are looking for an alternative,” according to Herwig Reynaert, professor of political science at Ghent University.
“The problem always in Belgium to form a majority is the fact that in the French-speaking part of Belgian voters are more left wing, and in Flanders you can say they are more central voters, so that’s quite complicated,” Reynaert adds.
At a federal level that means the country will probably be set for another lengthy period of painstaking government-formation talks while a caretaker administration minds the shop. Current prime minister Alexander De Croo was sworn in as the head of a seven-party coalition two years after the previous government collapsed.
In regional elections in Flanders, Vlaams Belang is polling at about 25 per cent, ahead of the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (NVA) on 20 per cent. Centre left party Vooruit is on 13 per cent, with a cluster of others hovering above or below support levels of 10 per cent.
Tom Vandendriessche, a Vlaams Belang member of the European Parliament, said support for traditional parties continued to shrink election after election. “The Christian Democratic party has always been the centre point of gravity … When I was born in 1978 this party got 48 per cent of the vote, my whole family practically voted Christian Democratic, it’s probably like Fianna Fáil. Now this party is at 10 per cent.”
Vandendriessche, who grew up in Bruges, said his party was on the brink of power in Flanders if the right wing NVA would agree to join it in a coalition to form a regional government. Such a scenario would likely spark a constitutional crisis given Vlaams Belang’s desire for Flanders to break away and become independent. “We will not have a revolution, we will have an evolution. We will declare ourselves sovereign in our parliament, and then we will enter into negotiations with Wallonia for the orderly separation of Belgium,” Vandendriessche said.
On migration the party would not be “building a wall” around Flanders, but it would push for the toughest possible asylum laws within the European Union. “We’re full, there is no room for new asylum seekers or labour migrants. Our people are fed up with this. We are losing our identity, people don’t feel at home any more,” he said.
De Croo, who leads the relatively small Open Flemish Liberals and Democrats, is fighting an uphill battle to try hold the centre together. Speaking at a campaign event in a trendy television studio in the northern town of Kontich on Wednesday, the Belgian prime minister said now was not the time for the two sides of Belgium to be fighting each other.
While beer was the drink of choice for most at the Vlaams Belang rally, supporters of the liberals were handed a glass of white wine on their way into the gathering. There was no smoke machine, but instead a sparkler-pyrotechnic display as De Croo and the other candidates made their entrance.
During his stump speech De Croo promised to fight against any “avalanche” of taxes levied on the middle class, to support businesses and stand against attacks on LGBT+ people and the rollbacks of other rights. “We will continue to fight for a free and open society,” he said. A strong vote for the liberals would prevent a “shutdown” of politics after June 9th, he told the crowd.
The other big story of these elections is likely to be the success of the far left. The Workers’ Party of Belgium is polling as the third most popular group in Wallonia and in fifth place in Flanders.
Speaking while handing election leaflets to workers outside a factory in the Brussels suburb of Anderlecht, Marc Botenga, the party’s sole MEP, said it had been successful in getting left-wing policies on to the domestic agenda. The socialist party, which is unique in running both in Flanders and Wallonia, is pushing for a wealth tax of 2 per cent on people with assets of more than €5 million.
Botenga said the rise in support for Vlaams Belang was deeply concerning. “I think most people voting for them are not voting in favour of Flemish independence; they’re just sick and tired of mainstream policies and mainstream traditional parties,” he said. “We want a united Belgium. I see it at a European level where Belgium on certain topics comes [to meetings] with four ministers and not one position, which for a small country like Belgium is completely ridiculous.”
As well as regional and federal elections Belgians are also voting to elect deputies to the European Parliament.
For Wilhelm Bommers (66), a German-born farmer who moved to Wallonia in the 1980s, overly burdensome EU regulations are among the most pressing issues of the campaign. Running a family farm in Gembloux, the agricultural heartland of the French-speaking region, Bommers has always been open to change.
The road up to the farmhouse winds past his fields of sugar beets and potatoes, but also several large wind turbines. More than two decades ago Bommers was approached by a company looking to rent a tract of land to install the turbines, something other farmers in the area baulked at. “We were the first in Wallonia,” he said.
In recent years he has had solar panels installed on the roofs of some of the old buildings, which bring in enough electricity to run the farm. “Everything changed in the world, every profession has to adapt his way of working…But there are a lot of farmers that didn’t have any evolution and now they are in front of a wall,” he said.
Despite being more open than most to changing how he has worked over the years, the increase in regulations is still a strain. “When I started farming I could do the office work after the day, one day per week,” he said. Now farms nearly needed to have someone to just look after paperwork.
Rules around treating crops with chemicals were complex and difficult to follow, leaving farmers little flexibility. “You do the work but there are a lot of crazy regulations; the regulations are made in offices,” Bommers said.
Agricultural policy has been pushed high up the EU agenda in the election year following large farmers’ protests that brought Brussels and other EU capitals to a standstill and at times turned violent. The pressure led the European Commission to relax some regulations on smaller farmers who avail of Common Agricultural Policy subsidies.
Bommers said the actions of the protesters risked turning people against farmers. “I cannot go to Brussels with my tractor and destroy Place du Luxembourg, making fires and burning trees and destroying monuments. In the beginning of the activities the population was on the farmers’ side, but when you go too far it will switch.”
While Vlaams Belang is surging in the north, far-right parties have made little inroads in the south.
Belgian mainstream parties sign up to a “cordon sanitaire” agreement not to co-operate with the far right. To date this has kept the extremists out of coalitions. In Wallonia that cordon extends to the media, who have a practice of not interviewing far-right politicians on live broadcasts or including them in televised debates.
Dr Benjamin Biard, head of research at the Brussels-based Crisp political research institute, said this was one of the main reasons there was no real far-right force in Wallonia. “It’s not the only explanation but it’s an important one,” he said.
Other factors included the lack of a charismatic leader, an active anti-fascist movement, and the fact that Wallonia did not have as strong a sense of separate national identity as Flanders. The far right were also riven with internal tensions and split into small factions, he said. “It’s not the case in the north where everybody is behind Vlaams Belang.”
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