POLITICS-BELGIUM: Far-right Faces Crucial Electoral Test

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Luc Verheyen

ANTWERP, Oct 5 2000 (IPS) - Everybody in Belgium will be watching, with keen interest, the score of the far-right in local elections next Sunday.

The neo-fascist Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) leads all rivals in opinion polls in the country’s second largest city and has a soaring following throughout the Dutch-speaking Flanders-region.

Yet, the party has remained politically isolated. For its leader, Filip Dewinter, the upcoming polls are “the real test,” political observers say.

Dewinter enjoys the same dubious reputation, as does Joerg Haider in Austria, whose Freedom Party, FPOe, ran an election campaign in October 1999 using the Nazi-invented slogan “Ueberfremdung” – too many foreigners.

He resigned as party leader in May after Austria’s 14 EU partners slapped sanctions on the country for allowing the Freedom Party to join the government coalition, but he is still generally believed to be pulling the party strings.

Belgians are called to the ballot box on Oct 8 to elect new municipal and provincial councils. The parties that constitute the so-called purple-green national coalition of liberals, socialists and greens, say they feel confident about the outcome.

The economy is thriving. In fact, Finance Minister, Didier Reynders, recently unfolded an impressive scheme of tax reductions that will benefit all income groups.

But some apprehensions remain. No one in Belgium has forgotten the “Black Sunday” during the last municipal elections on Oct 9, 1994.

In Flanders, where 60 percent of the electorate lives, the far- right Vlaams Blok scored high with a peak in Antwerp, the country’s second city.

The party doubled its votes in Antwerp to 29 percent and obtained 18 of the 55 seats on the municipal council.

Other cities, where the anti-immigrant party has become firmly embedded in political life, are Flander’s cultural capital Ghent and minor industrial towns with large immigrant populations like Mechelen, Boom, Sint-Niklaas and Beringen.

In Wallony, the French-speaking southern half of the country, similar radical groups, like the Front National (National Front) and Agir (Action Now), remain fringe-parties with only moderate voter support.

Founded 20 years ago as a nationalist party, which wanted to dismantle Belgium and establish an independent Flemish state, the Vlaams Blok has been running a xenophobic campaign since the mid- 1980’s.

“The Blok’s electoral successes are based on a simplistic but very effective strategy. The party has coupled its anti-immigrant tirades with pointed criticism of everything that goes wrong in the country,” says Dirk Haazen, a social worker.

“The Blok’s disturbing score in Antwerp was the combined result of growing xenophobia and frustration over 40 years of bad governance and neglect by traditional politicians.”

In some strongholds of the Vlaams Blok in Antwerpen-Noord and Borgerhout – which the Vlaams Blok consistently calls Borgerokko because of the majority of immigrants from Morocco who live there – one out of five families live in poverty and up to 30 percent of young people are jobless.

In these densely populated working class districts, up to 65 percent of the citizens entitled to vote opted for the Vlaams Blok in the 1994 elections.

After the Black Sunday six years ago, democratic forces in Antwerp had to join forces to keep the Blok from power.

“Sunday’s elections are the most important test for the Vlaams Blok since its founding,” says Marc Swyngedouw, a leading political scientist and director of ISPO Inter University Group on Political Opinion Research (ISPO).

“Can the party finally translate its soaring impact into political power?” In his view, the chances for the Blok are not good.

Only weeks before the election, leaders of the major national parties agreed on a ‘Charter for Democracy’ which states, among other things, that none of them will build coalitions with the Vlaams Blok.

The Charter is the base for an isolation strategy known as the “cordon sanitaire”, a sanitary cordon.

“The latest polls give the Vlaams Blok around 15,9 percent of the Flemish vote, slightly more (0,7 percent) than in parliamentary elections last year but with a status quo in Antwerp and Ghent. Most likely such a score will not be enough to break the cordon sanitaire,” says Swyngedouw.

For the moment, an “Austrian scenario” therefore seems unlikely in Belgium, he adds.

Last February Belgian foreign minister, Louis Michel, was one of the firmest defenders of European sanctions against Austria after the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) of Joerg Haider was invited into a national coalition there.

Michel even advised Belgian vacationers, who had planned to go skiing in the Austrian Alps, to change their mind. The Belgian diplomatic demarches against Austria were mainly aimed towards the public at home.

Michel, a French-speaking liberal, wanted to make it clear that the Vlaams Blok should, under all circumstances, remain in the isolation cell after Oct, political observers say.

Michel knew what he was doing. Highly frustrated with the cordon, the Blok had started in Flanders a head-on attack at the right-wing of the Flemish Liberals and Democrats (VLD) – the party of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt – and the conservatives within the oppositional Christian People’s Party (CVP).

Some of them believe “burning the extreme-right by power” is a better defence strategy than “isolating and victimising them.”

To win over hesitant conservatives, the Blok tries hard to appear as a decent party. Early this year, the party dumped its ‘Seventy points programme’ in which it details its anti- immigration policy proposals.

On its posters, aggressive symbols like boxing gloves and a broom for the “clean sweep” the party promises, have been replaced by smiling children that tell voters to feel “at home in your own country”.

A softer way of stating what the Blok used to tell voters in earlier elections: “Eigen Volk Eerst” (Our Own People First). But the different wrapping has not changed the core business of the Blok, observers say.

Political observers say that the extremist threat would immediately decline if compulsory voting were to be abolished and if long-time immigrants, who do not have the Belgian nationality, would be given voting rights.

Public opinion polls have shown that the support for the far- right is highest among low-educated and older people who declare that they would not vote if they were not obliged to.