It is not always easy to find oneself in the political families of Belgium. After celebrating in 2021, with pomp, its 175 years, the liberal family feuds between north and south against the backdrop of a contest over who is the real, more, liberal.
But the blues do not have the prerogative of differences. The historic Catholic family is no more, the socialist family keeps differences and even if the environmentalists form only one group in the Chamber, there are here and there different sensitivities.
Marketing tool…
The parties use this notion of forming a family between north and south, depending on the political interest of the moment.
Thus, the PS regularly recalls that it represents the leading party in the federal coalition and that the Socialists are its first family when it comes to influencing decisions.
Georges-Louis Bouchez uses this family concept much more than his predecessors, with no doubt a hope of pre-empting the formation of future coalitions, but 2024 remains far too distant a horizon to already be lost in conjectures.
The notion of “political family” is invoked above all when one wants to make oneself bigger than one is but one rejects it when one wants to mark one’s own specificity vis-à-vis one’s voters.
… too “Belgian” in Flanders
Thus, the Flemish Liberal Federal Vice-Premier, Vincent Van Quickenborne attacked with virulence, the French-speaking Liberal President, Georges-Louis Bouchez : He barks while we act. There’s a chasm like the Grand Canyon between his words and his deeds, […] he is more conservative than liberal […] Bouchez always comes back to the past. It is not the Reform Movement, but rather the reactionary Movement. Look at his Belgianism. Bouchez wants to return to RTT and BRT; on bilingual television. He can’t speak Dutch yet and he wants a public channel. I am far from being a separatist, but between Flemings and French speakers, there are a lot of differences. Dressed for the winter as rarely between partners and especially between members of the same family so vaunted the year of its 175 years.
Beyond the quarrel of people, it is a much more political repositioning that the Open VLD operates. Its Prime Minister has seen his image tarnished for his management of the pandemic in recent weeks and above all the Flemish political landscape imposes this brutal distancing on the liberals of the north.
Former Volksunie, Vincent Van Quickenborne knows that an image that is too “Belgian” can be harmful in an environment where Vlaams Belang and N-VA set the tone. In the north of the country, conservatism is also the prerogative of these two nationalist parties. The Open VLD intends to embody another path, in an environment much more to the right than in the south of the country.
Likewise, Conner Rousseau (Vooruit) keep distance with the Walloon PS, whose image remains charged with negative symbols in the north of the country. The personality of Frank Vandenbroucke also divides the socialist family.
“Protect me from my family, my adversaries, I take care of it” in politics, as elsewhere…