Protector of the people or enemy of democracy?

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the characteristics of Vlaams Belang (VB), Belgium’s main populist political party, and establishment parties’ responses to VB. The chapter analyzes VB’s position in the overall Flemish political party landscape as well as the party’s discourse. We first examine establishment parties’ responses to VB, most importantly poaching or imitation and the so-called cordon sanitaire (i.e., the consensus among other political parties that no coalition can be formed with VB), which allows VB to distinguish itself from other parties by laying claim to an ‘institutionalized exceptionalism’. Moreover, we contend that the cordon sanitaire has allowed VB to circumvent what Brubaker (2017) has called ‘the limits of enchantment’: by barring VB from governing, the party has never been called upon to put its claims to exceptionality into practice. Then, we examine VB’s anti-pluralist attitudes through its most recent election programme. In addition, an analysis of the party’s Facebook posts shows how it positions itself as a challenger to the established party system. The paper concludes that VB’s discourse takes advantage of Belgium’s institutional thresholds to exploit the impossibility of disenchantment – a paradox that would otherwise temper populist sentiments.