Beyond the Anglo-Saxon Experience: City-Suburban Political Polarization in Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

The electoral and political consequences of suburbanization have recently reappeared as a research topic in the Anglo-Saxon academic world. These studies are almost exclusively focused on the Anglo-Saxon countries themselves. This paper aims at broadening the scope of this research and analyses the electoral and political impact of suburbanization in Brussels, the largest Belgian urban region. By means of electoral and survey data, it is shown that city-suburban polarization is also evident in Brussels. Like in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the central city is becoming more left wing, while its impoverishment has resulted in suburban anti-urbanism. Suburban dwellers want to defend the suburban living environment against the perceived bad influences of the city, which is identified with foreigners and crime. However, the observed processes cannot be simply reduced to the Anglo-Saxon experience, where decreasing support for redistribution with the impoverished city is attributed to the growing self-sufficiency of the suburbs, which enables a life insulated from the central city. The Brussels central city remains the main provider of jobs and services and is, in that way, a strong representative of many Western European cities. Rather than resulting in suburban support for financial solutions to the social problems of the city, this only leads to a plea for a safe city for suburban users without much reference to its present inhabitants. This paper also reveals that the suburban area shows different patterns of electoral development, depending on the party political history of the various suburbs.