What Belgian politics can teach us
analysis – In the north as in the south, the liberal conservatives won the general election held in the country on June 9. A success that is not due to chance.
Would the French right have an interest in taking inspiration from Belgium? On June 9, our northern neighbours voted not only for the European Parliament, but also for the renewal of the chambers at regional, federal and community level. The country, deeply divided between north and south, saw for the first time the victory of the French-speaking right-wing party (MR) and the Flemish party (NVA), contradicting opinion polls that had predicted a victory for the far right in Flanders and the far left in Wallonia. The parties that won were those that clearly positioned themselves on the conservative-liberal axis. “A result that owes nothing to chance,” explains Alain Gerlach, columnist for RTBF and De Morgen.
On the Flemish side, this positioning is the result of a long-term strategy. Bart De Wever, the charismatic president of the NVA (New Flemish Alliance), claims to have been conservative since 2004. His goal: to give a strong internal ideological coherence to …
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