Explaining Vote Choice in the 2019 Belgian Elections

Democratic, Populist and Emotional Drivers

Abstract

On 26 May 2019, citizens across Belgium went (in the context of compulsory voting) to the polling stations to vote in the third, so-called mother of all elections, casting votes for the federal, regional (i.e. Flanders, Wallonia or Brussels) and European parliament on the same day. Remarkably, many Belgian voters seized this opportunity to send a strong signal to the major governing parties, voting for one of the radical parties on the two ends of the ideological spectrum the radical right Vlaams Belang (VB) (second party with 18.7% of the votes in Flanders) and the radical left PTB-PVDA (5.6% in Flanders, 13.7% in Wallonia). In addition, in Flanders, the first party was the N-VA with 24.8% and in Wallonia it was the PS with 26.1%. Such divided results had lasting effects, as they led to a new period of impossibility to form a majoritarian governmental coalition between the Flemish nationalists (N-VA) and the French-speaking social democrats (PS): the first being supposed to give more leeway on social reforms and the second on the transfer of federal competences to the regional level.