Winning Team
The Flemish Republic
The cause for Flemish independence was boosted enormously on 13 June when the Vlaams Blok, striving for a secession of Dutch-speaking Flanders from Belgium, became the biggest party in the country.
In the Flemish regional elections, the Vlaams Blok won 24.1% of the Flemish vote. It gained the support of one million voters in a country of only ten million inhabitants, six million of them Flemings. It won 32 of the 124 seats in the Flemish Parliament, three more than the Christian-Democrats, who, in an attempt to stop the rise of the Vlaams Blok, had gone to the elections in a “cartel” with a centrist (though equally separatist) Flemish-nationalist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), that got 6 seats. The elections were a blow to the leftist governing coalition of Liberals, Socialists and Greens, obtaining 25, 25 and 6 seats respectively and, hence, no longer able to form a new coalition.
The Vlaams Blok, originally founded in 1977 as a break-away of the Flemish-nationalist party, has transformed itself into a mainstream conservative party since the late 1980s, aptly filling the gap that the Liberals and the Christian-Democrats left when they moved to the left. From 3 percent of the Flemish vote in the 1987 general elections, the Vlaams Blok jumped to 10.3 in 1991, 12.3 in 1995, 15.8 in 1999, 18.2 in 2003 and 24.1 percent today.
The Vlaams Blok is now not only Flanders’, but also Belgium’s biggest party. It was supported by 981,587 voters, while the Parti Socialiste (PS), the biggest party in French-speaking Wallonia, Belgium’s southern half, got only 878,577 votes. It is significant that with this result the PS is allowed to send 4 members to the European Parliament, while the Vlaams Blok has only 3 MEPs. This discrepancy is due to the unjust Belgian system where the Francophones have always been overrepresented and the Flemings consistently minorised.
Cordon Sanitaire
Within the Belgian context, the largest Walloon party is the dominant political power in the country, while the biggest Flemish power, the Vlaams Blok, is rendered powerless. At the instigation of the Socialists, the Vlaams Blok has been isolated into a so-called “cordon sanitaire,” a formal agreement by all the other parties that they will never talk to the Vlaams Blok, let alone form a government coalition with it.
As Joshua Livestro explained in The Wall Street Journal Europe (June 16, 2004), the cordon sanitaire exists because “(t)he main proponents of the cordon sanitaire are the Socialists (…): they find themselves in the unenviable position of having to contest elections in a (country) that has always been predominantly center-right. Under normal circumstances, that fact would have condemned them to eternal opposition. But the cordon sanitaire helps to maintain the abnormal circumstances that make the formation of a center-right majority government impossible. As long as it stays in place, no coalition can be formed without left-wing participation.”
The Flemish voters no longer accept this abnormal situation. They want a Flanders governed by the center-right, including the Vlaams Blok.