One of the few centre-left parties in Europe in power, Belgium’s Socialist party, next month faces regional, national and European elections.
Socialist party leader and prime minister Elio di Rupo has won credit for his contribution to the country’s political stabilisation in December 2011, concluding 500 days of negotiations towards constructing a federal political majority after the general election of June 2010. However, according to polls, this time the vote could lead to anything from the renewal of the alliances led by di Rupo’s francophone Socialist party, renewed national deadlock – or the implementation of a neoliberal programme.
The reasons for this climate of uncertainty and, more precisely, for the possibility of a return of the Socialist party to opposition after 25 years in government are many.
First, Belgium is organised as a multiparty system based on proportional representation in a federal state. Asymmetrical alliances at the different institutional levels of power are possible but politically difficult to manage in a small country. Since 2011, the Socialists have been governing with the francophone liberal party at the federal level but without this partner in the regional governments of Brussels and Wallonia. Meanwhile, the Socialists and Greens are in coalition regionally, but not federally.
Second, the Flemish socialist party is not only historically weak but the Flemish Christian Democrats, which since 1945 have been the traditional allies of the Walloon Socialists, have changed considerably in recent years. They have lost their electoral hegemony in Flanders since the arrival of Bart de Wever’s nationalist New Flemish Alliance, which is now the most popular party there and which has articulated regionalist claims and questioned the size of financial transfers to Wallonia where the social cost of unemployment is still high. But there could be more to come as the current weakening of the leftwing of Flemish Christian democracy could foster a tilt towards the neoliberal economic agenda put forward by the NVA. Such an agenda is also favoured by liberal politicians in Wallonia.
The Socialist party, now chaired by the popular European intellectual Paul Magnette, is finally coming face to face with difficulties that are well known to its sister parties in other countries. It must face the ageing profile of its supporters but also what, building upon the late Peter Mair’s theoretical framework, Policy Network’s Michael McTernan and Claudia Chwalisz have recently diagnosed as a growing contradiction between governmental realism and popular representation. If the Socialists slip below 30 per cent of the vote in Wallonia, their performance will be akin to that of fellow progressive parties in Europe and they will have paid the price for being in government in tough times. Even recent small-scale reforms of unemployment benefits have provoked tensions with unions and electoral expectations in the radical left have recently illustrated the restrictions on the Socialist party’s freedom of manoeuvre.
If nobody expects tectonic movements in May, shifts in a few seats of any governing partner will be enough to upend the complex mathematical equilibrium reached in 2011 – and dramatically affect the future of the Socialist party.
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Christophe Sente is fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles