Political parties in Flanders

Flemish political parties operate in the whole Flemish Community, which covers the unilingual Flemish Region and the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. In the latter, they compete with French-speaking parties that all also operate in Wallonia. There are very few parties that operate on a national level in Belgium. Flanders generally tends to vote for right-wing, conservative parties, whereas in French-speaking Belgium the socialist party is usually the most successful one.

Flanders has a diverse multi-party system of politics. Many parties are active, and often none succeeds in obtaining more than one third of the votes, let alone a majority. Therefore, parties must work with each other to form coalition governments.

Most current Flemish parties grew from the main political parties that for long dominated Belgian politics: the Catholic Party (Church-oriented and conservative), the Liberal Party (anti-clerical and progressive) and the Socialist Party. These three groups still dominate Flemish politics, but they have evolved substantially in character. In the 21st century however, conservative nationalist parties such as Vlaams Blok/Belang and especially the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) which became the largest party in 2010, were successful and broke the domination of the traditional catholic, liberal and socialist parties.

The Christian-democratic party has its origins in the 19th century. in that period, it mainly competed with the liberals. They for long took turns in leading Belgian government. By the end of the 19th century, the then emerging socialist party rapidly took an important place in Belgian politics. This continued in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1930s, the Christian-democrats started feeling competition from Flemish nationalists.

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