Briefing: why that electoral earthquake?

Election Day, 26 May 2019, clockwise: king Philip (in a cartoon of Erik Meynen, Flanders' most brilliant political cartoonist) watching with surprise the victory fiestas at the extreme right Vlaams Belang and the extreme left PTB, while the leaders of the Flemish nationalists, Bart De Wever, and the French-speaking Parti Socialiste, Elio di Rupo, swallow their defeat.

 Forming a new federal government in Belgium is proving to be extremely difficult again, at least as difficult as in 2010-11, when it took 540 days of negotiations. Is this a symptom of a deeper disease of the country? To try to understand, let us start with the possible reasons why the elections of 26 May 2019 were such a condemnation of the previous government and of all traditional parties.

 The day after the elections last year, I was taken aside in the European Parliament, by a German colleague: ‘Come on’, she said, ‘I have been travelling through this country for now fifteen years since I live here. Flanders is rich, very rich, even compared to Germany. Unemployment is at 3 %, so almost non-existent. And you have a surge of the extreme-right with 12 %! How do you explain THAT?’ I had not an answer ready at that time. In the weeks thereafter analyses of the election results made clear what had created the surge. It was a combination of elements.

 Migration, the core business of the extreme right Vlaams Belang, surely was one element. It is in Belgium an even more complex issue than in other European countries, not the least because statistics can or cannot include the very low threshold to obtain the Belgian nationality. Since the year 2000 slightly less than 800.000 immigrants came to live in the country (7 % of the present total population of Belgium, half of them from inside the EU), while the total population in the same period rose with 1,2 million.

 But there are strong regional distortions. Wallonia has in total about 10 % more people born abroad than Flanders, but the latter has about 1,5 % more immigrants from outside Europe. The biggest immigration centre is Brussels, with inevitably the largest EU-community (25 % of its present population was born in another EU-country) but also the largest non-EU community (31 %). Numbers of the non-EU-born residents in Antwerp and other large Flemish cities are nearing the Brussels proportion (about 30 %), although the statistics are not wholly comparable. In Wallonia’s largest cities the level is far lower.

 This complexity lubricates the already emotional discussions on migration. It is easy to describe the issue in terms of French-speaking Belgium being easily more generous towards migrants, that, after having entered the country, in the end chose to go living in the more prosperous Flanders (besides Brussels of course). But if one compares Antwerp with Brussels, it is obvious that even without that distortion, Flanders in general reacts way more prickly, and sometimes even racist, on immigration than the French-speaking population of Belgium. Probably this is so because its nationalism is, like most of the Eastern European nationalisms, from quite recent times and not yet ready to see it dilute again in a globalising world.

  It did not help that in the last Belgian government the responsible minister for migration (Theo Francken) was a Flemish nationalist, executing quite correctly European policies, but presenting these as a clean-up of the mess of the past, and therefore (and because he is a Flemish nationalist) even more viciously attacked in French-speaking media on his immigration policies than most of his (in general Flemish) predecessors. It made immigration an even bigger political issue than it already was, especially after it became the final discussion on which the government fell apart.

 Playing on the immigration issue, Vlaams Belang did not neglect its old political base, taken away from the socialists at the end of last century. In those days they mobilised the fears of the vulnerable classes that were first confronted with the arrival of numbers of overseas migrants in their quarters and were denounced as being racist when they complained about it with their traditional socialist leaders.  Since the bankcrisis these voters feel they have to share too much of no longer growing social benefits and subsidies with the newcomers. The newest element in this is that climate change is described as an attack on the lower classes, with expensive legal demands for isolating old and poor houses and the obligation to exchange your old, but not yet worn out car for a cleaner but expensive new one. In its social program the Flemish extreme right ponders almost the same (quite utopian) demands as the extreme left. The Flemish socialists obtained only 9 % of the votes anymore in the elections of 2019.

 Above all the VB had the opportunity to present itself as the sole party that had renewed its leadership, with a 32-year old new boss, Tom Van Grieken, clever in debate and speech, who seemed at least in appearance to have pushed the old crocodiles aside. In his electoral victory speech he had only young man and (a few) girls in white T-shirt around him. And with that younger team he succeeded in dominating the crucial campaign-market of the social media, far ahead of all other parties. Not for nothing directors of very common middle class schools in Flanders reported that 30 to 40 % of their youngsters acknowledged to have voted for Vlaams Belang, as extreme right is the hype of the youth today as much as the extreme left was it in 1968.

 Were this some of the elements that explain the electoral upheaval in Flanders on 26 may 2019, there was no lesser upheaval in French-speaking Belgium but – typically – for totally different reasons. Contrary to Flanders there was a big breakthrough of the Greens, who seem to have benefitted of the erosion of the Parti Socialiste as the permanent ruler of the southern part of the country, from the absence of ecological sensitivities at the top of the liberal party, in contrast to a part of its electorate, and from the decline of the Christian democrats.

 Then there were the political scandals in Brussels – the PS-mayor of that city had to go, after the media reported that he cashed in quite royal attendance fees for (almost not) participating in the council of administration of the cities homeless’ organisation – and in Liège, where a whole network was laid bare of overpaid political officials in the structures of the many semi-public economic structures of that city. From these scandals it was especially the extreme left PTB that benefitted, in the same suburbs of Liège and Charleroi where many decades ago the communist party scored up to 20 % of the votes.

 Different to Flanders, Wallonia has for half a century been in economic decline, as the first region after Britain that developed an Industrial Revolution in the 19^th century. The worst of this decline is over since the new millennium, but the heritage of the past – the lack of investments, the obsolete housing and building infrastructure, the inefficient education system, the absence of a belief and a drive that the region can do better -  is still quite big to overcome.

 These different sentiments of revolt in both Flanders and the French-speaking parts of the country have one thing in common: a general disenchantment with the traditional parties that ruled the country for at least the last four generation, the Christian democrats, liberals and socialists. They are perceived as mere career machines for professional politicians, always ready to throw away the principles if a good career opportunity is at hand. They surely are not considered to be capable of formulating good answers to new challenges such as migration, climate change or the economic havoc that globalisation also spreads around.

 There is definitely a need for great changes and reforms, while at the same time the traditional parties that could perform this are weakened and not adapted to renew, and the newer ones are still too extremist to rule. All this sounds like a recipe for more frustrations and turmoil to prop up, until it eventually explodes.