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Author: Wim Haelsterman | Date: January 2001
In sharp contrast to the success of the Flemish extremeright Vlaams Blok in elections to local and provincial councils in Belgium in October, the deeply-divided Walloon far right hardly managed to survive the polls. Its decline is a remarkable tale of falling votes and lost assembly seats, the result mainly of endless internal conflicts and shambolic political amateurism.
Six years ago, the Belgian Front National (FN), headed by the controversial Dr Daniel Féret, and the Liège-based party, Agir, led by Robert Destordeur, accomplished a small “breakthrough” on a local level by securing the election of nearly 100 councillors. The Front National managed to elect 73 municipal and 10 provincial councillors, mostly in Wallonia’s bigger cities such as Namur, Liège and Charleroi, but also in the Brussels region in towns such as Anderlecht, Molenbeek and Schaarbeek.
The much smaller and more radical Agir, notorious for its virulent anti-immigrant programme and the violent behaviour of its activists, had eight municipal and three provincial councillors at the time. Ten of them were elected in Liège. Another small far-right splinter party called the Front Régional Wallon (FRW) had a seat in Colfontaine. But since these successes internal conflict has broken out in both Agir and the FN, mainly fed by personal problems between the innumerable self-appointed leaders of both organisations.
These factional wars, often labelled by reporters as “wars of the little führers” and fuelled by a bizarre cocktail of frustrated personal ambitions, organisational chaos and a great lack of experience, led very rapidly to the atomisation of the two main far-right parties into various insignificant splinter groups, such as Référendum, Droite Nationale (DN), Front de la Nation Belge-Parti (FNBP), Front Social Wallon (FSW) and Front Nouveau de Belgique (FNB), to name but a few.
Most of these initiatives died an early death. Only the FNB, an FN-offshoot founded early in 1997, has seemed viable, despite the fact that most of the members of its founding committee were later fired. The FNB is the only splinter group to represent a real challenge for the “mother party”, the FN.
In 1998 the Front National lost most of its seats in the federal and regional parliaments, retaining only two MPs in the Brussels regional parliament, one in the national parliament and one in the Walloon parliament, which is dominated by social democrats and liberals. The FN also lost its only seat in the European Parliament, which Féret had held for six years. The results in October 2000 were far worse than in 1994.
The Walloon extreme right lost most of its seats, even in cities where it was considered strongly implanted.
The number of FN local and provincial councillors was slashed from 83 to six. In the Brussels region, the FN is now represented only in Molenbeek, one of the region’s most deprived areas. Even there, the FN only held two of the seven seats it gained in 1994. It was the same story in the larger cities of Wallonia. The FN group in Charleroi city council is the party’s biggest nationwide, yet it consists of only three seats after the party lost two councillors.
The FNB, led by Margueritte Bastien, a former judge and FN MP, got only two candidates elected: one in Mouscron (4,5%) and another in Verviers (4,8%). These were very disappointing results for the hyperambitious iron lady of the Walloon far right, despite an intensive campaign that cost her party a considerable portion of its funds.
The Bloc Wallon (BW), a political newcomer founded in April 2000 and led by the former FN member Georges Hupin, was likewise not very successful. It won no seats and got lousy results everywhere. The new party, accused by the FNB of being aided and financed by the Vlaams Blok, stood candidates in eight cities. Its best result was its 3% in Herstal in Liège province. Other far-right parties such as Prosec and Agir polled pitifully low votes that hardly merit a mention.
In Schaarbeek, one of the larger towns in the Brussels region, the infamous Vlaams Blok MP Johan Demol headed a so-called “bilingual list” that went under his own name. Before embarking upon his political career, Demol had been chief constable of Schaarbeek but was forced resign after lying about his past activities in the nazi militia, the Front de la Jeunesse (FJ). The violent FJ was outlawed by the Belgian authorities in 1981 after one of its activists killed an Arab immigrant.
The Vlaams Blok supported this unprecedented initiative by not participating in the elections and by financing the DEMOL campaign. which concentrated on “law and order” type themes, rather than the Vlaams Blok’s traditional nationalist themes. Four candidates on the DEMOL list were elected and the list got 8.5% of the vote; yet another disappointing result as Demol was aiming at no less than 8 seats and 15%.
© Searchlight Magazine 2001