Belgian Politics & Elections: Federal, regional & EP elections on June 9, 2024

[Zinneke]

https://twitter.com/PDelwit/status/1759995939962372237

Seat projection in latest polls. The PS in Brussels is getting hammered.

https://twitter.com/PDelwit/status/1760206632099680527

(Take the Flemish college with a pinch of salt because they can never poll the dutch-speakers in Brussels correctly)

[Zinneke]

Note that the Brussels poll in Laki's post is for the federal constituency hence why some Flemish and Francophone parties run joint lists (usually a Flemish Brusseleer in 3rd place)

[Zinneke]

Olivier Maingain has accused his DéFI presidency successor François De Smet’s cabinet of outright vote rigging when deciding the regional lists and has thrown the party into complete civil war, and its gaining a lot of media attention. Maingain is reportedly unhappy with the direction of “his” party under De Smet’s leadership, although its unclear if there is any ideological substance to this,  although rumors that De Smet is more keen on a right-wing alliance with the old enemy MR might be it. Maingain though just bangs on about how De Smet should listen to the local elected officials more instead of campaigning on vaster issues. The sad thing is that De Smet could have actually led a party with some interesting ideological zeal, away from outdated Francophone minority rights and more focused on reforming governance at Francophone level as a whole. But instead there are no interesting proposals, just typical baron politics.

 Anyway it’s another big boost for MR in the capital, where the topic of insecurity and public drug use is also in the headlines following 4 shootings. The only issue is that all it does for MR is run up the vote tally in the places you’d expect them to do well anyway. Their strategy of cosying up to the likes of Kir or other minority “community leaders” might actually be what pushes them over the line to first place.

[Zinneke]

A PTB/PVDA elected official in Brussels switches to MR, to even his great surprise

https://twitter.com/MR_officiel/status/1765041001393963327

I'm sure it has nothing to do with narrow communitarian/sectetian dog whistling from GLB (all while he retweets the Islamophobie French Right Twittersphere) and generic Brussels politician careerism from Handichi.

[Zinneke]

A few minor updates :

DierAninal, the most successful animal rights party in Belgium with its 1 seat in the Brussels Regional Chamber, has just lost that seat to Écolo : Victoria Autstraet will run on the green party's list next election (and its surprising given Ecolo BXL are pro-halal and kosher animals not being stunned before).

Agora, the other surprise minor party that won a seat, will only run at federal this time as their demand for citizen assembly type councils was partially adopted by the Brussels parliament.

The crisis in Défi has worsened to a point where Maingain has announced he will not run or participate in the campaign for the federal or regionals, only focusing on his commune in Autumn. He was expected to be a list pusher as his name recognition in Woluwe St Lambert gets them many votes (it is actually a semi-functioning commune in Brussels, which is a rarity). Given it's a kingmaker party of sorts since islts split with MR this will have an impact.

Dried Vanlangenhove, the guy who set up Schild en Vrienden, a neo-Nazi militant group, has been given a year's prison today for his hate speech actions. Pretty rare for politicians here to get prison time unless they've murdered someone (and even then...)

Bouchez's latest stunts are quite something: saying he'll leave Belgium if "things stay the same" (YOUR PARTY HAS BEEN AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL IN POWER FOR 25 YEARS), oh and welcoming not one but two criminals on his Brussels regional list.

PS meanwhile : Di Rupo doing strange tiktoks in his 70s, and Di Rupo fellow list pusher Luc Hennaert, a former magistrate, arguing that cocaine should be legalised and prisons abolished, even though he's campaigning for EU elections where none of that really matters. But then any attention is good attention.

[Zinneke]

DierAninal, the most successful animal rights party in Belgium with its 1 seat in the Brussels Regional Chamber, has just lost that seat to Écolo : Victoria Autstraet will run on the green party's list next election (and its surprising given Ecolo BXL are pro-halal and kosher animals not being stunned before).

Are other parties stricter on this subject?

Put it this way : MR and Défi are vocally more in favour of stunning animals. But like ECOLO, their actual parliamentarians vote according to confessional lines usually. Défi are the ones who pushed the vote.

In the Flemish college, Groen for example were unanimously in favour of stunning animals before ritual slaughter.

[Zinneke]

Elon Musk was openly backing DVL on twitter and now he can brag about it to all his inmates.

[Zinneke]

I think there a a increasing chance that Chez Nous will outperform polls

Bouchez covered the right-wing populists well up until the start of the campaign. But his recent actions have hardly been great in keeping that sort of voter : recruiting a PTB member of Moroccan origin just to tow the line to that community,lying about military service and saying that if nothing changes in Belgium he'd leave it (likely to Dubai knowing him because he just absolutely loves the kitsch glamourous lifestyle). So there's a definitely again a sense that efforts of creating a right wing populist electoral market are hindered by the fact that most political entrepreneurs seeking it are from bourgeois backgrounds with no connection to the voter pool that Chez Nous tries to go after (lumpen and 4chan posters)

A few minor updates :

DierAninal, the most successful animal rights party in Belgium with its 1 seat in the Brussels Regional Chamber, has just lost that seat to Écolo : Victoria Autstraet will run on the green party's list next election (and its surprising given Ecolo BXL are pro-halal and kosher animals not being stunned before).

Apparently, she had been expelled from DierAnimal in 2020, they lost their seat long ago.

Yeah she left during COVID I forgot. She isn't immediately joining ECOLO for legal reasons I think because there's still some sort of dispute. She's a bit of a free spirit as you can imagine but was obviously advised if she wanted to pursue a more high profile career she should join ECOLO.

[Zinneke]

So it's official, N-VA are running lists in Wallonia, their first head of list in Brabant Wallon is a guy known for being a troll on twitter :

https://twitter.com/PDelwit/status/1770480787147682254

Difficult to say whether they are half-arsing it to just get the money as Vlaams Belang did before in Hainaut, or if like 95% of the rest of the Belgian political class they hate Bouchez enough to just try anything to sabotage him. This is a big blow to MR given the last BW seat will likely be a close toss up between them and one of the other traditional Walloon parties.

[Zinneke]

Even less a chance they make it if N-VA run in all 5 Walloon Provinces.

[Zinneke]

I don't mind them splitting the vote of the right wing in Wallonia tbh.

You should, as increased turnout means that PTB-PVDA wins less seats.

Turnout isn't as big a factor in Belgian elections

[Zinneke]

Another far right European "patriot" caught helping a Chinese spy get a visa. This time the guilty party is Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, most known for calling for a "White Europe" back in the day. But helping illegals come to Belgium, and supporting a country still nominally communist.

[Zinneke]

Another far right European "patriot" caught helping a Chinese spy get a visa. This time the guilty party is Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang, most known for calling for a "White Europe" back in the day. But helping illegals come to Belgium, and supporting a country still nominally communist.

And, yet, their opposition continues to be weak, instead of just calling them Chinees Belang.

They are way ahead of you. But then there is no opposition other than VB and PTB/PVDA

[Zinneke]

https://twitter.com/DGodefridi/status/1776150694124261533

The chief N-VA francophone candidate/troll on twitter is now calling out Vooruit because their posters resemble Stalinism and National Socialism all at once. Have to say along with the name change, logo change and the last party president's choice views on Romani,  he may have a point!

(But still Melissa )

[Zinneke]

https://twitter.com/lesoir/status/1778635667599167816

In which the most indebted of city-regions in Europe finds a way to claim 70k in expenses for their employees for going to golf course

[Zinneke]

As we approach to the elections the majorities across the board are slowly, inevitably crumbling. I already spoke earlier in the thread about how the Federal Vivaldi coalition was basically at a standstill with major reforms not being able to pass (the tax shift reducing charges on income in favour of increased VAT was blocked by the MR, who all parties in the Vivaldi, including Open VLD and De Croo, recognise as the ball and chain).

Now there is an effective falling of the Walloon government and the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles government on the cards due to the reform of higher education (Décret Paysage) on the horizon and agreed in the negotiations for the formation of the Fédération (that deals with education).

The reform was pushed by MR and was wide ranging but it is the stricter requirements to pass the first year courses that is the key element of contention from the Francophone Students Union (the FEF, notoriously I should say, seen as a platform to an eventual promotion into PS and ECOLO cabinets, but still quite plural). They argue that thousands of students could potentially be impacted by the fact that they will be forced to cease their studies if they even failed one course from their first year program but continued to pass all of the others through the rest of the studies. They also believe that students still impacted by Covid lockdown should not be the generation to bear the brunt.

MR and university administrators in favour of the measure argue that too many students often treat higher education as simply a way to maintain their student status until their late 20s to be more employable : in Belgium the minimum wage is so high that for a young worker a student status allows them to be employed without the employer paying so much tax on it. MR also are heavily targeting the angry boomer vote that believes that standards should be stricter for everyone except themselves. University administrators (some but not all) are frustrated at potential cuts when they believe many students are simply costing more than they are producing by being enrolled.  I personally have witnessed first hand people in my circle of friends registering for courses just to be able to enter the labour market, without attending a single course, but then this is a wider issue in Wallonia-Brussels - too high cost of labour,  bad transition from studies to work in general, denigration of technical schools despite massive shortages in technical jobs.

Anyway, the pressure from the FEF meant ECOLO and PS decided to bring back the Minister’s legislation to the fore yesterday and amend it, passing it in subcommittee with help of the PTB. MR and Les Engagés, in perhaps a hint at a future alliance, both wanted to maintain the text as it is. A furious Pierre-Yves Jeholet (the MR Minister-President of the Federation) has come out this morning essentially announcing that the government was now a “current affairs” one, where alternative majorities are now possible. This also opens the door to the potential Red-Red-Green in Wallonia, which the N-VA is practically begging for by running spoiler candidates there just so they can justify the Brown-Yellow-(Orange/Blue) government in Flanders.

In other news, Emir Kir, the mayor of Brussels commune Saint-Josse-Ten-Nood, shut down an international “National Conservatives” conference yesterday. This caused a mini-commotion at federal level as Prime Minister De Croo insisted that the right to assembly was constitutional. Kir is an obvious hypocrite given he was kicked out of the PS for having far right Turkish mayors visit his commune as if they were respected dignitaries, but he came out this morning saying it was a matter of public order. The speakers included Farage, Suella Braverman, but also people like Filip Dewinter who are more traditional neo-fascists (unless its about receiving money from China for fake visas).

Overall the campaign is noted for its inability to set clear themes. Last time two real events marked both sides of the linguistic communities : in Flanders it was the brutal murder committed by a released felon that focused on the lax justice system and helped VB, and in Wallonia and Brussels the climate protests were top of the agenda. In this campaign, there have yet to be real events like this and instead it revolves around very particular, technical issues like the “Décret Paysage” above or the GoodMove in Brussels, that are then simplified to get the social media hits. All the polls show though that what people care about the most is buying power. Analysts note that the Vivaldi parties are probably doing this campaign strategy on purpose because they know they have very little idea how to fix the buying power problem and that everybody black balls some of the obvious “fixes” (MR blackballs the tax shift, PS blackballs spending cuts etc). This leaves an absolute boulevard for the extreme parties to talk about cost of living issues, and is another explainer as to why they are so high in the polls. Debates in general seem to have very little effect here compared to the Netherlands.

[Zinneke]

the tax shift reducing charges on income in favour of increased VAT was blocked by the MR, who all parties in the Vivaldi, including Open VLD and De Croo, recognise as the ball and chain

Why on Earth would MR be opposed to that? Are many of their members the sort of small businessmen who get their €€€ from Frenchies and Germans shopping for cheaper cigarettes/alcohol/​petrol/​whatever?

The tax shift basically isn't a direct tax cut. It's idea is to make up the losses of tax revenue with an increase on taxes on things like sugar, football tickets and gambling. About 2 weeks ago Humo, a Flemish investigative paper, explored the close relationship that GLB had with the gambling companies, including the fact that Ladbrokes sponsored his rally racing and the football club he currently runs alongside his 10 other mandates(that he also hilariously, in true GLB narcissistic fashion, changed the logo of his football club to look more like himself). When Francophone media picked it up, GLB called them to intimidate the journalists and remove the articles. The gambling industry's lobby is also headed by Damien Thery, an ex-MR bruiser. Safe to say the links between MR and certain industries that were "targeted" are very close. VLD are much more independent-minded and ideological.