In Flanders, the merger process is much broader since it concerns 28 municipalities which will become thirteen. These mergers will be effective on January 1, 2025 and the installation session of the new municipal councils will take place the next day. In the other Flemish municipalities, those whose borders have not changed, the new councilors are taking the oath all this week. The same goes for the Brussels Region, except in Saint-Josse where, there too, it will be necessary to vote again.
But the municipal elections of October 13 were above all marked by a major turning point for Belgian politics: for the first time, the Vlaams Belang (Flemish far right) will lead municipalities in Flanders and the PTB (far left), in Wallonia and in Brussels (the PTB had already managed the municipality of Zelzate and the Antwerp district of Borgerhout in Flanders).
Absolute majority in Ninove for Vlaams Belang
The accession to power of these two parties, even if the circumstances vary from one locality to another, marks a spectacular acceleration of their normalization process. The argument according to which any vote in their favor is a wasted vote will no longer have the same force with voters, whether for the municipal vote or another level of power.
The PS-Écolo-PTB agreements are a sort of pendulum effect against the center-right MR-Engagés axis.
The situations of Belang and PTB are nevertheless different. If these are two populist and anti-system formations, a cordon santé has been set up around the Vlaams Belang by which the other parties undertake not to govern with it, which is not the case for the PTB.
In Flanders, Belang will govern at least in four municipalities: in Ninove where it obtained an absolute majority, but also in Ranst, Brecht and Izegem where it formed a coalition with local partners.
A weakened sanitary cordon
However, we cannot speak of a definitive rupture of the sanitary cordon. The large traditional parties signatories to the cordon (CD&V, Vooruit, Open VLD and Groen) have not concluded an agreement with Belang and have excluded from their ranks their representatives who did so at a local level. These agreements are solely the result of an agreement with small local lists.
But the symbol is there: Vlaams Belang will govern. In six years, he will have a record to defend, he will have learned to manage a municipality, to make decisions, to make compromises. In other words: it will have normalized. This is, moreover, the strategy adopted for a long time by President Tom Van Grieken. Flemish political observers noted that the communal agreements entered into by Belang barely reflected the party’s positions. Proof that the main thing was to gain power, before really influencing local politics.
The agreements concluded by the PTB in Mons, Forest and Molenbeek are not revolutionary either. But, unlike Belang, they were linked with traditional parties, the PS and Ecolo.
In Forest, the radical line of the PTB dissolves in a classic left-wing majority agreement
Asked whether they were ready to govern with the PTB, the PS and especially Écolo have kicked aside in the past, responding that the question did not arise since the PTB refused to take its responsibilities. They have just demonstrated the opposite.
And one day in the Walloon government?
The PS and Écolo say they take these municipal majorities with the PTB as experiments. Either. For the moment, in any case, it seems that a coalition in the Walloon Region one day bringing together the three left-wing parties is within the realm of possibility. We come back to this: the standardization of the PTB is on the way.
Paul Magnette: “It is as much the attitude of the MR and the Engagés as the result of the ballot boxes that led to this situation”
That said, the rapprochement of the PS and Ecolo with the PTB cannot be understood without taking into account the evolution of the French-speaking political landscape. The MR and Les Engagés, big winners of the June and October elections, seem to form a solid axis. This is evident at the scale of the Walloon, federal and Brussels governments. But also in many localities. The PS-Ecolo-PTB agreements are a sort of pendulum effect against this center-right axis.
