For the first time in its history, Belgium has a prime minister who is a Flemish nationalist. Bart De Wever, who wants the Dutch-speaking Belgians to separate from the French-speaking Walloons and have their own state, rode a wave of nativist and right-wing sentiment to bring his New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party to power in the February election. The election results show that the country is lurching to the right even in the traditionally leftist stronghold of Wallonia, which has seen a surge of support for right-wing populists and authoritarians alongside mounting anti-immigrant sentiment. If Flemish nationalists have their way, De Wever will be Belgium’s last prime minister.
De Wever is a man of many paradoxes. Although he is a passionate defender of the Dutch language and his N-VA party criticizes the Walloons — the French-speaking Belgians who compose 40% of the population — for not speaking enough Dutch, he also has a penchant for weaving expressions in Latin and English into his speeches.
De Wever is committed to dismantling Belgium and replacing it with two independent states — Flanders and Wallonia — but his mission is to hold it together until he can rip it apart constitutionally. This plan was on full display during the excruciating eight months when Belgium was without a functioning government, while De Wever engaged in intense horse trading to form a coalition of five parties to create the federal government he had spent his career trying to tear apart. On Feb. 5, he took the oath of office, swearing allegiance in French and Dutch to King Philippe of the Belgians, although the monarchy symbolizes the country his party rejects and is committed to abolishing.
Adding to the paradoxes, Bart De Wever allied with parties that were committed Belgianists, loyal to the country’s constitutional monarchy and its complex federal-linguistic system representing both the Flemish and Walloon populations, in order to become prime minister. He also turned his back on the far-right Vlaams Belang, a populist Flemish party which advocates separation from Belgium and has its traditional base in the multicultural port city of Antwerp. The other parties have for decades maintained a cordon sanitaire around Vlaams Belang due to its racism and extremism.
The head of Vlaams Belang, Tom Van Grieken, has been behaving like an abandoned lover ever since De Wever openly and forcefully rejected his advances during and since last year’s general election. Van Grieken had been hoping that N-VA would join forces with Vlaams Belang and agitate for a unilateral separation from Belgium within five years of forming a government if the Walloons did not acquiesce to a negotiated Flemish independence. N-VA remains committed to a more gradual constitutional path to independence, which involves an increased devolution of powers to the regions and the eventual breaking up of the country once regional autonomy resembles independence in everything but name. The key difference between the two parties is that N-VA seeks a kind of velvet divorce sometime in the vague future, while Vlaams Belang wants to set an expiry date on Belgium’s existence.
Vlaams Belang and N-VA are closely aligned on the issues of Flemish autonomy and independence, but their views diverge in other areas. On economic policy, for example, N-VA is openly neoliberal and fiscally conservative. In contrast, Vlaams Belang has, in recent years, been profiling itself as a “social people’s party.” It has borrowed extensively from the solidarity discourse of the left while promoting anti-union and anti-worker policies. The party has squared this circle through supremacist and xenophobic rhetoric: They blame Walloons and migrants for eroding the Flemish welfare state, through the so-called “money stream” from relatively richer Flanders to Wallonia and the Flemish tax revenue that supposedly gets used up by sponging immigrants. The party promises to claw back the state funds it claims have been stolen from hardworking Flemish people.
The two Flemish nationalist parties also differ in their view of ethnic and religious minorities. N-VA is willing to accept people with foreign roots as Flemish, as long as they are not “woke” and are fully signed up to the party’s vision of Flemishness. One of N-VA’s most prominent figures is Zuhal Demir, the Belgian-born daughter of ethnic Kurds who immigrated from Turkey. In her current role as Flemish minister of education, Demir has taken her party’s language fixation to an extreme. She plans to require mandatory Dutch language lessons for schoolchildren and to impose financial penalties on parents who haven’t learned to speak the language.
Vlaams Belang takes a narrower nativist view of Flemish identity, one rooted in ancestry, race and soil. The party is vehemently opposed to multiculturalism and is rabidly anti-Islam. Vlaams Belang also identifies with Donald Trump’s style of far-right populism. “We [Vlaams Belang] are taken more seriously abroad than at home,” Van Grieken lamented in comments reported in Het Nieuwsblad, a popular Dutch-language newspaper, after attending the new president’s inauguration in Washington, D.C.
Van Grieken’s attitude has cooled somewhat since the president took office. “We are, of course, not the spokesperson of President Trump. In many areas, there are similarities in content. Just like us, he wants a strict migration policy, to keep woke nonsense out of education, to put national interests first. But of course, we do not just blindly side with the American president. After all, he has American interests in mind, and we have Flemish interests,” he told New Lines. “We mustn’t be naive — those with diverging interests sometimes have conflicting interests. That does not alter the fact that it is clear that a new, patriotic wind is blowing in the U.S. and in Europe.”
Van Grieken wasn’t the only far-right European who was in Washington to witness Trump’s second coming. Italy’s Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, French far-right polemicist and presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, and Euroskeptic former Member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage, to name a few, were also there.
A kind of transatlantic symbiosis has emerged. The electoral success of the European far right last year gave the Republicans a shot in the arm, while Trump’s victory has given the European far right a boost. “[Trump’s reelection] makes [the European far right] feel in a winning mood … but whether it will also lead to greater success in Europe remains to be seen,” Hendrik Vos, a professor of European politics at Ghent University, told New Lines.
The strong turnout of European far-right leaders at the presidential inauguration hints not only at the transatlantic ties between far-right parties, but the deepening links between them within Europe, which are becoming increasingly formalized. “These ties are getting closer and closer. There have been personal points of contact for some time, but as the far right becomes better organized and also forms a large group in the European Parliament, more and more attempts are being made to form a united front,” Vos observed. “Trump also arouses disgust in Europe. In a sense, it further reinforces the polarization in society.”
While leftists and progressives in Europe find almost everything about Trump and his administration objectionable, conservative Europeans view his anti-Europe rhetoric and policies, the battering ram he has taken to the Western order and his hostility toward Ukraine, among other issues, with repulsion.
Vlaams Belang exemplifies this trend of cross-border nativism. While it is a very local nationalist party, it also has close ties to the far-right parties in other countries. The party has three MEPs and is part of a new Euroskeptic political family known as Patriots for Europe, which was founded by Orban. The party also has ties with other extremist parties across Europe, including the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands; the National Rally in France; the Alternative for Germany party (AfD); and the Northern League in Italy. For the past few years, Italy has been governed by the far-right Giorgia Meloni, who is both the country’s first female prime minister and the leader of the misogynistic, neo-fascist Brothers of Italy.
At last year’s European Parliament elections, far-right parties gained about a quarter of the votes, putting them in a position either to be a powerful opposition force or to lure the center right toward their camp and become king- or queenmakers. Although a de facto cordon sanitaire exists at the EU level, as it does in Belgium, center-right politicians are drifting ever further rightward, and some are surreptitiously working with far-right forces on common causes, such as undermining the EU’s climate policies, attacking civil society or pursuing a tough line on immigrants and asylum-seekers. This helps to explain why the tone of Ursula von der Leyen’s second term as president of the European Commission is so radically different from her first, during which she launched the European Green Deal, a legacy she is quickly backpedaling from.
“The cooperation with our European partners through, among others, Patriots for Europe has always been good, and I expect that we will be able to build on this in the coming years,” Van Grieken said optimistically.
Despite the far right’s impressive and troubling success at the European Parliament elections, their nativist, petty nationalist stances are their Achilles’ heel. “They try to convey a common message, fulminate against the existing establishment and have a brutal style in common,” observed Vos. “At the same time, there is always a tension: These are parties that use ‘our people first’ as a slogan, and inevitably, sooner or later they will clash with others who also put their own interests first.”
Vos points, for instance, to the split between northern and southern European far-right parties over the southward flow of EU funds. Another major pressure point is Russia. The war in Ukraine has caused major divisions between far-right and white nationalists in Belgium and throughout Europe. While white supremacists were railing against the “Islamicization” of Europe and preparing to resist the imaginary migrant army invading the continent, a real army, largely made up of fellow white Christians, invaded a European white Christian country. To overcome the cognitive dissonance caused by the war, many white supremacists have reached for their ideological comfort zone — antisemitism. They now view the conflict as a Jewish conspiracy that pits white people against one another.
For those on the far right who saw Vladimir Putin as the muscular last hope and savior of the white race, the Russian dictator’s decision to invade Ukraine has been emotionally devastating; it also created a schism between white supremacists who support Ukraine and those who are pro-Russian. The far-right leaders of the pro-Ukraine contingent collect money for the cause and urge their followers to participate in the defense of Ukraine, even as a training ground to gain combat experience for the race wars they expect at home. Those who support Russia see Putin as the defender of white interests against NATO aggression; they have convinced themselves that Ukraine will be better off under Russian control.
This division can even play out within individual parties and organizations. For instance, some Vlaams Belangers have pro-Russian sympathies. One was party luminary Filip Dewinter, who visited Russia in 2019 and addressed the Duma. He also visited Assad’s Syria and China. “I thought that [Putin] was a nationalist, but he’s evolved into an imperialist. I was wrong,” Dewinter admitted in a 2022 interview with De Zondag, a free weekly tabloid.
Meanwhile, Van Grieken has been trying to distance his party from Putin. It expelled Frank Creyelman, a former parliamentarian and senator who had close ties with Moscow and even acted as an observer during a so-called referendum in the Crimea in 2014, after an investigation revealed his espionage links with China.
Beyond party ties, the grassroots of the far right have also developed extensive cross-border links. One example is Dries Van Langenhove, who founded the extreme right-wing youth group Schild & Vrienden (“Shield and Friends”) while at university and successfully ran for a seat in Parliament as both an “independent” and as a candidate on the Vlaams Belang list. Van Langenhove has also managed to gain rock star status among the far right abroad, including in Hungary and the U.S. When Van Langenhove was convicted last year of inciting violence and Holocaust denialism, Elon Musk rushed to his defense.
In 2023, Van Langenhove addressed the white supremacist American Renaissance Conference, organized by the racist New Century Foundation, where he was given a hero’s welcome. In his speech, Van Langenhove called on the audience to organize to fight for “our people” so that “the lands of our ancestors remain the lands of our descendants.”
Expressing the paradoxical superiority-inferiority complex at the heart of contemporary white supremacy, the young activist lamented the supposed deterioration and decline of the so-called white race and its civilization. “We men of the West were not made just to sit back and enjoy life. We weren’t made to chase happiness,” Van Langenhove said. “It’s our nature to fight, to struggle, to suffer, to honor our ancestors and to achieve great and glorious things.”
This rehashing of the classic white man’s burden, as Rudyard Kipling called it, is a common trope among white supremacists. “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build; we produce; we go upward,” said Richard Spencer, the American far-right activist. Spencer made these remarks while delivering a speech at a rally that took place shortly after Trump won his first presidential election. Several members of the audience at that rally gave Nazi salutes.
Van Langenhove also urged white people to acquire combat skills. “When I saw how weak our youth have become, how they get beat up at school by nonwhites, and how they’re being dominated even in places where they’re not yet a minority, I didn’t start whining,” he said. “I took action. I established boxing clubs, where our youth can take free boxing classes and work out.”
What the head of Schild & Vrienden did not tell his American audience, possibly because of the legal battles his organization was facing in Belgium due to the country’s strict gun laws, is that for some of his comrades the training did not stop at boxing or martial arts. Some members of the far-right youth group have traveled abroad for combat training, including to Poland and Serbia, according to journalistic investigations in Belgium, and a few are even on state security watchlists.
One popular destination is the European Security Academy in western Poland, which seems to attract a remarkably high number of white supremacists from all over the world in addition to its legitimate business of training soldiers and police officers, despite the academy’s insistence that it does not allow such groups to train there.
Like other white supremacists, Van Langenhove frames his cause as one of protecting the indigenous peoples of Europe against invasion and occupation, of resisting oppression, which they otherwise dismiss as “cultural Marxism” or “woke.”
“They expected our youth to become weak, fat and depressed. They expected the family unit to be replaced by the state. They expected the immense surge in antidepressants and suicides. They expected our women to be raped en masse in Europe,” he claimed. “But they didn’t expect that we would resist. They didn’t expect that we would not go gently into that good night.”
The “genocidal rhetoric” of which Van Langenhove spoke was a reference to the far-fetched conspiracy theory in far-right circles that “globalists” (white supremacist code for Jews) have set in motion a “white genocide” or “great replacement” to erase the white race and replace them with immigrants from other parts of the world.
Despite the absence of demographic evidence and the failure to uncover anyone actually involved in such a conspiracy, the fantasy has spread all over Europe and across the Atlantic ever since the “great replacement theory” was invented and popularized by French author Renaud Camus in 2011.
In Dutch, Van Langenhove uses the term “omvolking” to describe this “great replacement.” Derived from the German “umvolkung,” or “ethnic conversion,” the Nazis used the word to describe a perceived de-Germanization of the supposedly superior Germanic race via integration with what they believed were inferior groups. Vlaams Belang politicians often use the term, although the party chair, Van Grieken, has vowed to use it less frequently because the controversy around the term distracts from what he regards as the real issue: mass migration. But Gerolf Annemans, one of the party’s elders who is currently serving as a representative in the European Parliament, doubled down on the use of the term and his belief in the “globalist elite” pulling the strings of mass migration.
When I asked Van Grieken if he was concerned that such inflammatory talk stigmatized migrants and placed minorities in danger, his cold reaction lacked any words of empathy, let alone sympathy. “Whether you call it superdiversity, multiculturalism or omvolking, that the composition of the population is changing is a demographic and social reality with an enormous impact,” he said. “No society can bear that. The dramatic consequences of mass migration and failed integration are as clear as day. You cannot solve these problems by being silent.”
Although less rabid, anti-immigrant sentiment and discourse has increasingly seeped from the far right into the mainstream at a time, paradoxically, when that mainstream is becoming more diverse and when the future feasibility of the country’s social safety net and welfare system increasingly depends on the tax revenue brought in by migrants and their descendants.
Belgium’s current governing coalition has vowed to pursue the “strictest” migration policy the country has ever seen. Even the Flemish socialist Forward party has hitched its cart to the anti-immigrant wagon train and effectively thrown migrants under the bus. Its party leader, Conner Rousseau, caused widespread controversy and condemnation when it emerged that he had engaged in a drunken tirade against the country’s marginalized Roma community at a pub in his hometown of Sint-Niklaas.
But the pull of the extreme right is not necessarily inexorable. Although Flemish independence is off the table for now, N-VA is leading the charge to hollow out the Belgian state and to set in motion harsh austerity measures. However, resistance is already mounting. An example of this is the wave of strike action that has emerged in response to the austerity measures in the government agreement struck by the current ruling coalition. And more strikes are in the pipeline.
There are regular demonstrations, marches and rallies against racism and misogyny, and in defence of progressive issues. For instance, on International Women’s Day, thousands marched not only in the capital, Brussels, but a record number also took to the streets in Ghent, the most progressive city in Flanders, in festive but strident defiance of the rising tide of misogyny seeping into public discourse and policy both at home and abroad. “Our movement is growing and we will not be silenced,” Fauve Peirelinck, who belongs to a local women’s collective, said at the rally in Ghent, which I attended.
The scenic streets of this medieval city were also the backdrop for large protests late last year against attempts to exclude the Green party from the coalition governing the local council, despite its strong showing in the local election, and bring in N-VA, which remains small in the city. The protesters managed to convince the socialist Vooruit party members to vote against the proposed coalition, keeping the Flemish nationalists at bay in Ghent.
Elsewhere in Europe, too, the resistance is mounting, as exemplified by the regular anti-AfD marches and rallies that take place in Germany.
Nevertheless, although the rise of far-right authoritarianism and exclusionary politics is not irreversible, the situation is alarming and troubling — in Belgium, in the EU and, most of all, in the United States. What happens next in all these arenas will have long-lasting consequences on both sides of the Atlantic.
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