Why Belgium may be about to break up
Mounting concern over migration is fuelling a surge
for Flemish independence parties ahead of an election next year.
BY BARBARA
MOENS
JULY 21,
2023 4:01 AM CET
Sooner
rather than later, Belgium may cease to exist.
The small
Western European state that hosts the headquarters of the EU and NATO has long
had a dysfunctional national political life. It holds the world record for the
longest time taken to form a government during coalition talks — over 500 days.
Now the
strains between Dutch-speaking Flanders, in the north, and French-speaking
Wallonia in the south of the country threaten a far bigger crisis.
Elections
are due to be held in June 2024. According to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls, the
far-right Vlaams Belang party — which wants to turn Flanders into a fully
independent, breakaway state — is now the biggest political force in the
country.
Tom Van
Grieken, who became president of his party when he was only 28 and who has been
key to its recent success, has been firm about his plans for independence if he
wins.
“We believe
Belgium is a forced marriage,” Van Grieken told POLITICO in his office near
Brussels’ EU quarter. “If one of them wants a divorce, we’ll talk that out as
adults … we have to come to an orderly division. If they don’t want to come to
the table with us, we’ll do it unilaterally.”
Even for
many of the country’s 12.6 million inhabitants, the imminent end of their
country might come as a surprise.
The
hard-fought battles between the Flemish-speaking north and the French-speaking
south have cooled in recent years.
Flemish
citizens, once the underdog despite outnumbering their French-speaking
counterparts, now have the language rights and the political competences they
long asked for.
“For many,
the battle is somewhat fought,” said Karl Drabbe, a publisher with roots in the
Flemish movement. Within the federal state of Belgium, the regions now have
wide powers over the delivery of education, agriculture policy and transport.
“That has
not led to earth-shattering leaps forward — on the contrary,” said Drabbe. The
appetite for mounting “the barricades” for “big steps in state reform” is
therefore limited, he said.
But the
leaders of Vlaams Belang don’t just rely on their pro-independence policy for
support.
Rise of the right
Across the
EU, the far-right has risen in recent months as the bloc battles with
immigration, slow growth and high inflation. Populist and anti-establishment
parties have won support in this context.
Belgium is
one of the European countries dealing with a major influx of asylum seekers,
with numbers of arrivals similar to the migration crisis of 2015.
In
Flanders, migration is seen as the number one concern for voters, according to
recent research. “Vlaams Belang owns the migration theme, which is very
important to a lot of Flemish voters,” said Nicolas Bouteca, an associate
professor at the University of Ghent. “That is the main reason for their
success.”
For Bart De
Wever, the president of the Flemish nationalist party N-VA, “the same trend is
happening across all of Europe right now.”
There is “a
wave of tremendous unease” among citizens who feel “economically abandoned by
their own elites,” he told POLITICO. “And as unfair as you may find that, the
far right is capitalizing.” In the polls, his party, the N-VA, is now the
second biggest in Flanders, after Vlaams Belang.
Potential
voters for Vlaams Belang see migration as the most important political issue,
followed by taxes and the economy. A reform of the Belgian state is
significantly less relevant to them, according to the same research.
Belgium was
created in a chaotic, unplanned way — en stoemelings, in the Brussels dialect.
Could the country’s demise also come about by accident as a result of voters
simply wanting to tackle migration?
Van Grieken
says nobody could fail to notice his party’s support for Flemish independence.
“It’s not that people don’t know. It is the first point of our program,” he
said. Van Grieken acknowledged that not every one of his voters might be
emotionally moved by the idea of independence. “But I do know that someone who
is anti-independence will not vote for my party, or for N-VA.”
The path to divorce
Van
Grieken’s strategy is to become the biggest party in Flanders in the elections
next June, which would give him the prerogative to choose his coalition partner
for the Flemish government. Ideally for him, that would be the N-VA. Then, the
Flemish government would issue a declaration of sovereignty to force the
French-speaking coalition partners to negotiate the end of Belgium as it
currently exists.
There are
hurdles, even if Van Grieken wins. Within the N-VA, there is fierce
disagreement whether to form a government with Vlaams Belang. Such a move would
break a decade-old promise of the Belgian political establishment not to govern
with the far-right. Even if N-VA took the fateful step of teaming up with the
far right, the French-speaking side of Belgian politics is likely to be a
no-show at the negotiating table, at least to begin with.
Still,
every one of these steps would create further political instability in Belgium,
and that on its own could help promote the cause of independence.
That vote
was followed by a tortuous 500-day search for a coalition deal, and De Croo has
been struggling to keep the governing parties on the same page on key issues
ever since.
The further
decline of the parties in the center at next year’s election would make forming
a national coalition government even harder. Ivan De Vadder, a veteran
political reporter who wrote several books about Belgian politics, fears this
would create a vicious cycle.
“Most
people look at the Flemish government, because you can talk about those moves
in comprehensible chess terms,” he said. “For me, what will happen at the
federal level is much more explosive, because you risk a total blockade of the
political institutions … That’s much more explosive for the survival of Belgium
than the idea of Flanders proclaiming independence.”
Van Grieken
takes the point. “It is not because there is a Flemish-national party that
Belgium is imploding. It is because Belgium is not working that there is a
Flemish-national party.”
Pieter Haeck contributed reporting.
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