A question from Vlaams Belang MP Tom Van Grieken about the furloughing of Cooperation Minister Meryame Kitir (Vooruit) sparked an outcry in the House on Thursday. The president of the far-right party received six calls to order from the president and a threat to use force. Tom Van Grieken finally returned to his seat to the cheers of his party members, thus delaying the sitting of the chamber. In his question, the hon. member harshly attacked the socialists and the alleged management of human resources by the minister and her Vooruit party.
Adrien De Marneffe and his guests came back to this incident on LN24 in the program “Les corridors de la Chambre”. “In politics, parliamentary obstruction is a classic technique. The Vlaams Belang is trying to get people talking about it here, it’s an incident that can help it gain visibility”, explained Benjamin Biard, doctor in political science specializing in on the far right. “Since the establishment of the De Croo government, the Vlaams Belang has constantly wanted to question its legitimacy […]. We see that he is always trying to push the nail harder. Let’s not forget that the 2024 elections are getting closer and closer and that the party in successive polls seems to be consistently winning.”
Benjamin Biard then insisted on the importance of social networks for the far-right party. “The Vlams Belang is particularly successful on social networks, it invests massively. During the 2019 election campaign alone, it spent more on its own than all the other Flemish parties combined. Which is colossal when you know that at this time there were only three parliamentarians out of 150 in the House of Representatives”, he explained.
For his part, the journalist Antoine Clevers recalled that the incident this afternoon was rather an exception for the Vlaams Belang, which generally works like all the other parties. “So of course, he will defend his ideas which are sometimes quite sulphurous, but in the procedures there is nothing extraordinary that stands out. Vlaams Belang has been operating like this for years and years. […] In the way it works, if we disregard the content of their ideas, we don’t really see any difference between Vlaams Belang and other democratic parties,” he concluded.