Catholics/Christian Democrats After
World War II, the
Catholic (now Christian Democratic) Party severed its formal ties with the Church. It became a mass party of the centre. In 1968, the Christian Democratic Party, responding to linguistic tensions in the country, divided into two independent parties: the
Parti Social Chrétien (PSC) in French-speaking Belgium and the
Christelijke Volkspartij (CVP) in Flanders. The two parties pursue the same basic policies but maintain separate organisations. The CVP is the larger of the two, getting more than twice as many votes as the PSC. The chairman of the Flemish Catholic party is now
Sammy Mahdi. Maxime Prévot is president of the Francophone Catholic party. Following the
1999 general elections, the CVP and PSC were ousted from office, bringing an end to a 40-year term on the government benches. In 2001, the CVP changed its name to
Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams (CD&V). In 1971 the German wing of the PSC became independent to get the name
Christlich Soziale Partei. In 2002, the PSC changed its name to
Centre démocrate humaniste (cdH), and in 2022 again to
Les Engagés ('The Committed Ones') abandoning their christian democratic roots. After the big losses in the 1999 general elections, when both CVP and PSC were banished to the opposition benches, some party members decided to leave the mother parties in order to form a new
liberal-conservative party. In
Flanders, the
New Christian Democrats (NCD) was founded by
Johan Van Hecke and Karel Pinxten. In
Wallonia, the '''
Citizens' Movement for Change''' (MCC) was founded by
Gérard Deprez. Both parties soon joined the major liberal parties, respectively the VLD in Flanders and the MR in Wallonia.
Socialists/Social Democrats The modern Belgian Socialist parties are the descendants of the
Belgian Labour Party. They have lost much of their early
Marxist trends. They are now primarily labour-based parties similar to the German
Social Democratic Party and the French
Socialist Party. The Socialists have been part of several postwar governments and have produced some of the country's most distinguished statesmen. The Socialists also split along linguistic lines in 1978.
Conner Rousseau is the current head of the Flemish Socialist Party and
Paul Magnette is the current president of the Francophone Socialists. In general, the Walloon Socialists tend to concentrate on domestic issues. In the 1980s, the Flemish Socialists focused heavily on international issues, and on security in Europe in particular, where they frequently opposed U.S. policies. However, first with
Willy Claes, then
Frank Vandenbroucke and with
Erik Derycke as
Foreign Minister, all three Flemish Socialists, the party made a significant shift to the centre adopting less controversial stances on foreign policy issues. The Francophone
Parti Socialiste (PS) is mainly based in the industrial cities of Wallonia (
Liège,
Charleroi, and
Mons). The Flemish Socialists' support is less regionally concentrated. PS is known in East Belgium as
Sozialistische Partei (SP). The Flemish Socialists changed their party's name to
Socialistische Partij Anders (SP.a) in 2002 and to
Vooruit in 2021. Recently, because of grassroots allegations about the party's "too little Socialist stand" in many political issues, a radical party wing broke away from the motherparty and formed, with support from smaller leftist parties, the
Committee for Another Policy (CAP). Within the SP.a, the more Marxist
SP.a-Rood, is trying to change the course of the party.
Liberals The Liberal Parties chiefly appeal to businesspeople, property owners, shopkeepers, and the self-employed, in general. In the terms generally used in English-speaking countries, Belgian liberals would be called "moderate conservatives", "fiscal conservatives" and "social liberals". There are two Liberal parties, formed along linguistic lines: The
Open Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten (Open VLD) who opened up their ranks to Volksunie and CD&V defectors some years ago, managed to break the dominance of CD&V over Belgian politics in 1999. Open VLD is currently headed by
Eva De Bleeker. The
Mouvement Réformateur (MR) is the equivalent party on the Francophone side, and is headed by
Georges-Louis Bouchez. The MR is a federation mainly composed of the former
PRL, and is eventually also composed of the Christian-democratic split-off called
MCC. It used to be composed of the Brussels-based
FDF until September 2012, Recently, the Flemish liberal party faced several high-ranking elected officials breaking away in order to found new "right-liberal" parties: MEP
Ward Beysen (
Liberaal Appèl, LA), senator Leo Goovaerts (
Veilig Blauw), senator
Hugo Coveliers (
VLOTT), chief of the High Supervisory Committee
Willy Vermeulen (
Verstandig Rechts), VLD board member
Boudewijn Bouckaert (
Cassandra vzw) and senator
Jean-Marie Dedecker (
Lijst Dedecker, LDD). There has been also francophone "right-liberal" parties: senator
Alain Destexhe (
Listes Destexhe) and former Deputy Head of the Cabinet of Serge Kubla (first
Libéral Démocrate, LiDé and later co-founded
Parti populaire, PP).
Communists The first
communist party in Belgium was founded by the more radical elements of the
Belgian Labour Party in 1921 and was named the
Communist Party of Belgium (KPB-PCB). The party was a member of the
Comintern and entered parliament in 1925. It received its highest score in the post-war
elections of 1946, when it won 12.7% of the popular vote and took part in the next coalition government. With the start of the
Cold War the party started its decline and after the
elections of 1985 it was no longer represented in the
Belgian Parliament. The party eventually disbanded itself in 1989, but two minor parties, the
Kommunistische Partij (KP) in Flanders and the
Parti Communiste (PC) in Wallonia, see themselves as the successors. The most successful
Maoist movement to emerge in Belgium was
All Power To The Workers (AMADA-TPO) at the end of the 1960s during a time of students protests at the
University of Leuven. In 1979 this movement evolved into the '''
Workers' Party of Belgium''' (PVDA-PTB), which is currently the largest communist party in Belgium and is represented in various municipal and provincial councils, as well as in the
Chamber of Representatives, in the
Flemish Parliament, in the
Walloon Parliament and in the
Brussels Parliament. Other minor communist and far-left parties include: the
Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR-SAP) and the Left Socialist Party (LSP-PSL).
Regionalist parties A specific phenomenon in Belgium was the emergence of one-issue parties whose only reason for existence was the defence of the cultural, political, and economic interests of one of the linguistic groups or regions of Belgian society. See
Flemish movement. The most militant Flemish regional party in Parliament in the 1950s and 1960s, the
Volksunie (VU), once drew nearly one-quarter of Belgium's Dutch-speaking electorate away from the traditional parties. The Volksunie was in the forefront of a successful campaign by the country's Flemish population for cultural and political parity with the nation's long dominant French-speaking population. However, in the nineties, the party has suffered severe setbacks. In October 2001, the party disintegrated. The left-liberal wing founded
Spirit, later called the
Social Liberal Party, while the more traditional Flemish nationalist wing continued under the banner
Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA). After a disappointing result in the
regional elections of 2009, the Social Liberal Party decided to merge with the Flemish ecologists of
Groen!. The N-VA, on the other hand, formed an electoral alliance with Christian-democratic CD&V from 2004 to 2008. After this period, the party's popularity grew significantly and it became the largest Flemish party. N-VA won the 2010 federal elections with 28% of the Flemish votes (17.4% of overall vote) and the 2014 Flemish parliament election with 31.9% of votes. The N-VA is led by
Bart De Wever who has been mayor of Antwerp since 2013. N-VA member
Geert Bourgeois has been minister-president of the Flemish government from 2014 to 2019. N-VA policies are primarily focused on economic reform through extended
devolution of political power within the Belgian
confederation model of governance, and do eventually propose full secession from the Belgian confederation.
Democratic, Federalist, Independent (DéFI) is a Brussels French-speaking Belgian political party that aims to defend and expand linguistic rights of French-speaking people in and around Brussels. It has been affiliated with the
Mouvement Réformateur, a liberal alliance party, under the name FDF. The
Union des Francophones (UF) is an electoral list combining the major Belgian Francophone parties for the regional elections in Flanders. The German-speaking
Pro deutschsprachige Gemeinschaft (ProDG) is the successor of the hard-line
Partei der Deutschsprachigen Belgier (PDB). PDB itself split from the Christian-democratic CSP and was a member of
European Free Alliance and
Federal Union of European Nationalities (ProDG is still member of the latter).
Greens The Flemish (Agalev) and Francophone (
Ecolo) ecologist parties made their parliamentary breakthrough in 1981. They focus heavily on environmental issues and are the most consistent critics of U.S. policy. Following significant gains made in the 1999 general elections, the two green parties joined a federal coalition cabinet for the first time in their history, but were ousted after the next elections. Agalev subsequently changed its name to Groen! in 2003. In 2012, the party dropped its trademark exclamation point and went on as
Groen.
Nationalists The foremost Flemish party in Belgium is the
Vlaams Belang, which was founded in 2004, after its predecessor was condemned by a High Court for "permanent incitation to discrimination and racism." On the far right, the Flanders separatist party
Vlaams Blok steadily rose in the 1980s and 1990s. The other parties except the
fortuynist party
VLOTT maintain a
cordon sanitaire on the Vlaams Belang as they did the Vlaams Blok. {{cite news {{cite news In Wallonia, the
Front National (FN) was the largest anti-immigrant Wallonian party. Officially, it was a bilingual party, but in reality, it was a purely French-speaking group, although it did support Belgian federalism. ==Alliances==