Belgium’s wanna-be government unscathed in local elections, early results indicate

Belgium’s June election winners bolstered their positions in local elections on Sunday.

Belgians went to the polls to vote for mayors and local councilors, as well as for provincial councils, just four months after votes that reshuffled the country’s national and regional power configurations.

Since the June election, new governments have been formed in Belgium’s French-speaking Wallonia region in the south and in Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north. But talks on a Brussels regional government and a new national government have stalled amid complaints that parties were unwilling to compromise as they campaigned for local elections, which they counted on to strengthen their hands.

As the first results of the local elections trickled in, June’s election winners appeared to have held their ground.

The Flemish-Nationalist N-VA was once more confirmed “the largest party of Flanders, by far,” said the party’s President Bart De Wever, mayor of Antwerp and possibly Belgium’s next prime minister. In Antwerp De Wever’s list had a comfortable lead over its main challenger, the far-left PVDA. 

De Wever is in difficult and long-winded talks to lay the groundwork for a national government of his N-VA party together with the Dutch- and French-speaking centrists of CD&V and Les Engagés, the French-speaking liberals of the Reformist Movement (MR), and Dutch-speaking socialist party Vooruit. With the local elections out of the way, those negotiations could now resume at full speed.

In Wallonia, MR and Les Engagés, which won the June election and have since formed a governing coalition in the French-speaking region, booked strong results.

Les Engagés President Maxime Prévot successfully defended his position as Namur’s mayor, according to initial results. First results also suggested that MR President Georges-Louis Bouchez had failed to dethrone the socialist mayor in Mons.

But the party’s Brussels head, David Leisterh, scored a major win in his own commune, Watermael-Boitsfort, with a joint list with Les Engagés. The party also booked big wins elsewhere in the capital region, though not across the board.

Leisterh, who is in pole position to become minister president of the next regional Brussels government, had hoped Sunday’s results would “underpin the June results and therefore confirm there’s a demand for change,” he told POLITICO ahead of the election.

After a poor showing for French-speaking Ecolo in June, the Greens also took a hit at the local level in Brussels, although they curbed their losses in some communes. Lead Greens negotiator Elke Van den Brandt, of the Dutch-speaking Greens, had hoped for strong local results in Brussels amid tough regional coalition talks marked by clashes with the MR.

Meanwhile, Flanders’ anti-migration and Flemish-Nationalist Vlaams Belang party claimed wins as well. 

In the small city of Ninove, west of Brussels, the far-right party won an absolute majority, giving Vlaams Belang its first-ever mayor in local lead Guy D’Haeseleer. The party had made headway in “almost every commune,” making it “one of the winners of these elections,” the party’s president, Tom Van Grieken, said on Sunday.

The election was marked by lackluster participation — particularly in Flanders, where turnout dropped to around 60 percent in many communes as it held local elections without an obligation to vote.