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Far-right party predicted to gain popularity in Belgium general election

Belgium's general election will be held on Sunday. A far-right party advocating for the country's division is expected to receive significant support.

 

Three separate votes are taking place in the country this Sunday. Two of them are for the European Parliament and regional seats.

 

However, the national vote is what everyone is talking about in Belgium right now.

The rise of the right in Flanders and the left in Wallonia, where most people speak French, suggests that allying could be problematic in the coming weeks and months.

 

In Dutch-speaking Flanders, the far-right New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) is being pushed aside for the first time by Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest).

This nationalist and separatist party wants Flanders to be independent and has a strict policy against immigration.

 

Tom Van Grieken, the party's 37-year-old head, wants Flanders to become its own country. He calls Belgium a "forced marriage" and a mix of "two separate democracies that have little in common," where neither side controls its future or economy.

 

Van Grieken is leading Vlaams Blok, a party rooted in an anti-immigration movement in the 1970s, to considerable gains in the polls.

The party is expected to get 27% of the votes in Flanders, up from 18% in the last general election.

 

It is enough to beat N-VA, which brought down the last government after Charles Michel, then prime minister, said he would back a UN migrant deal.

 

According to a new poll released on Thursday by RTL Info, the Socialist Party (PS) won the last regional elections and is tied with the liberal Movement Reformateur (MR) for 24% of the vote in Wallonia.

 

The Belgian Workers' Party (PTB) is expected to get 16% of the vote in Wallonia. It is also on track to get just over 9% of the vote in Flanders, which is running under the Dutch name PVDA, just ahead of Open Vld, the party of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.

 

As with the Netherlands, where elections were held in November, and there is still no prime minister, the expected results point to another long government bargaining process.

 

Last time, Belgium broke its record of 589 days without an elected government. After 652 days, De Croo was brought in as prime minister of a seven-party alliance called the Vivaldi coalition.

 

Vlaams Belang made much progress on Sunday, but they will still need to be able to take power. They couldn't in the last government because other parties agreed not to work with them.

 

This so-called "cordon sanitaire" was placed on Vlaams Blok in 1989 because of its immigration plans, which opponents said went against the European Convention on Human Rights. It has never been removed.

 

In the European Parliament, there is a similar ring sanitaire. The prominent conservative, middle, liberal, and green parties make it impossible for far-right groups to hold strong posts on any panels.

 

On Sunday, the Belgian government will decide whether it is fair to prevent a freely elected party with a significant vote share from taking power.

 

He said, "As long as the government is based on a majority in parliament, there is no reason why this should be inherently undemocratic." Benjamin Biard is the head of study at the Centre de recherche et d'information socio-politiques.

 

He also said that the major parties had made a deal 30 years ago about a circle sanitaire, which meant that Vlaams Belang had never been in power at the local, regional, or federal level.

However, N-VA had never signed on to that agreement. "Its president is not always clear on the matter." They might work together if they win more than half of the seats in the Flemish parliament.

 

He said this was not "guaranteed" because it could keep Vlaams Belang out of a possible federal government. Several French-speaking parties have already said they will not only work with someone who works with Vlaams Belang.

 

Conservative leader De Croo made it even harder for Vlaams Belang to work together with the N-VA on Sunday. He said that the combination of liberals, Christian Democrats, socialists, and greens had "governed well," but now that the election was over, it was time for the center-right groups to work together.

 

The Vivaldi coalition's left-wing parties reacted quickly. Petra de Sutter of the Greens said she was upset by De Croo and that the only way to stop "social demolition" was to form a progressive group after the election.