Will Belgium become Europe's next hard-right government?

Following Italy and the Netherlands, Belgium is set to become the next country where the largest party in government sits in a far-right European grouping. And Austria may not be far behind.

For years, the largest party in the Belgian parliament has been one that thinks Belgium shouldn’t exist. Now, the home of European surrealism looks set to have a prime minister who doesn’t believe his country should exist.

The New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which was founded as a regionalist party advocating for an independent Flanders in 2001, has come first in every national Belgian election of the past 14 years, while also controlling the state government of Flanders. But despite coming first, N-VA has mostly been excluded from national coalition governments because of its separatism (except between 2014 and 2018). But the party’s seccessionism, and its politics, are complicated. Since its foundation, N-VA has drifted more toward a confederalist position - using calls for secession merely as a maximalist position to get the real goal, self-taxation for Flanders.

The biggest complaint of N-VA has been that Flanders, the wealthy Dutch-speaking north of the country, heavily subsidizes Wallonia, the poor French-speaking south of the country, because taxation is only federal rather than by region (state). N-VA’s stated goal is a Belgium that remains a country in name only but that is effectively three different states (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels). One could argue that Belgium’s hyper-federal system, which divides competences far more than other federal countries like Germany or the United States, has already become a country in name only since the federalization process of five decades ago. But taxation is still the big remaining sticking point and one of the few things that’s still done at federal level (unlike in the US, where people pay a combination of federal and state income tax, the Belgian states don’t tax income).