In addition to the European parliament election, which we looked at earlier this week, two members of the European Union held their national elections at the same time – as it happens, two of the more electorally dysfunctional members. Among other things, they show the complexity of the narrative about “rise of the far right”. Today we’ll look at Belgium; tomorrow, Bulgaria.
The Belgian parliament elected in 2019 ran for a full term. But the incumbent government, led by Flemish liberal Alexander De Croo, has only been in office since October 2020; it took 16 months to form a government, not far short of the record of 18 months set in 2010-11. Its seven parties held 88 of the 150 seats between them: Dutch-speaking liberals, centre-left, centre-right and Greens, and French-speaking liberals, centre-left and Greens.
That meant it excluded the two largest parties in parliament, the separatist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and the far-right Vlaams Belang, with 25 and 18 seats respectively. But that is mostly an artifact of the division of the other parties on linguistic lines; if you take liberals, centre-left and Greens as a whole, they all had more seats than Vlaams Belang and the first two had more than N-VA. It did, however, mean that the governing parties, although they represented a clear majority of the vote overall (53.4%), were very much in the minority in Flanders.
Out of this complex fragmentation, the government that was finally constructed seemed to work reasonably well. But the mood in Europe is very much anti-incumbent, and so this time most of the governing parties went backwards. De Croo’s party, the Dutch-speaking liberals, dropped 3.1% and lost five of their 12 seats; the two Green parties lost 4.7% and 12 seats between them; and the Dutch-speaking centre-right and French-speaking centre-left both lost some ground. Only the French-speaking liberals (up 2.7% and six seats) and the Dutch-speaking centre-left (up 1.4% and four seats) could boast any gains. (See official results here.)
In aggregate, the seven governing parties fell to 47.5% of the vote (down 6.0%) and 76 seats (down 12). That means they still have a majority, but the narrowest possible, so it’s no surprise that at least some of them decided that it’s impossible to carry on as before. Dutch-speaking liberals and French-speaking centre-left both announced that they would not be part of a new government and would go into opposition (although such post-election vows should always be treated with some scepticism).
The government’s losses did not mostly go to the far right. Vlaams Belang, which had led in the polls for most of the last year, only picked up 1.8% and two seats, while its French-speaking counterpart, Chez Nous, won only 0.9% and failed to win a seat. N-VA dropped a seat, although it remained the largest party with 16.7% and 24 seats. The big winner was the French-speaking centre-right, the one mainstream party that had stayed out of the De Croo government: it picked up 3.1% and won 14 seats (up nine).
None of the current governing parties will work with Vlaams Belang, so there are basically two options for a new coalition. One is to bring N-VA within the tent, compiling a majority with the aid of the two centre-right parties, the French-speaking liberals and the Dutch-speaking centre-left, for a total of 82 seats. This has broadly been the goal for the previous three elections, to tame the separatists by bringing them within a mainstream alliance, but it succeeded only for a four-year period in 2014-18 before splitting over differences on immigration.
Building governments around anti-system parties isn’t easy, as several countries have discovered in recent years. Politics professor Bart Maddens nicely captures N-VA’s dilemma: “Although [N-VA leader] Bart De Wever wants greater Flemish autonomy, by forming a functioning federal government, he risks demonstrating that Belgium does in fact work.”
The other option is to reformulate something like the outgoing broad-based government, but bringing in the French-speaking centre-right. There seems no enthusiasm for making that attempt, but nor was there in 2019: it was just the fallback position that came to the fore after everything else had been tried and failed. It’s possible that, some months down the track, the same thing might happen again.
The World is Not Enough 
By ‘the French-speaking centre-right’ you must mean Les Engagés. I read that the party has gone through significant change recently, including changing their European affiliation, which makes me wonder how much it’s still ‘centre-right’.
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