Abstract
While the Vlaams Blok (currently Vlaams Belang) became one of the most successful and
electorally durable extreme-right parties in Europe in the 1990s, the francophone Front
National has yet to achieve a stable basis of support. We argue that an important reason for
this divergence has been the behaviour of Social Democratic parties in the two regions of
Belgium. In Wallonia, the Parti Socialiste (PS) held onto its traditional electorate through
both distributing material benefits and by keeping traditional economic themes, or issues
that it ‘owns’, high on the political agenda. The SP (currently SP.A) in Flanders has done
less well on both counts. Since Social Democratic parties across Western Europe have lost
voters to the extreme right, our comparison suggests that their behaviour is an important
variable in understanding cross-national variation in the extreme-right’s success.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 179 |
Number of pages | 1 |
Journal | Contemporary Politics |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2008 |
Keywords
- Belgium
- issue salience
- clientelism
- Social Democratic parties
- extreme-right parties