Radical Right-Wing Parties Facing the Wall of the Local ? The Vlaams Belang and Local Elections (1982-2018)

Many radical right-wing parties have marked significant growth in the last 20 years. This spectacular dynamic has received thorough attention from the scientific community. Their electoral performance has most often been analysed at a national level. Analysis at sub-national levels is rare. This paper analyses the performance of the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in local elections in Belgium between 1982 and 2018. Our analysis shows that the Vlaams Belang was able to overcome all institutional and political barriers in order to compete successfully at this level. At the same time, we find that the institutionalisation process at the local level is not a predictor of the ensuing electoral result for the party. On the contrary, the local electoral result corre-lates to the national curve and the global image of the party. In this dynamics, local elections could lead to different outcomes for the Vlaams Belang. The 1988 and 2018 local elections paved the way to a larger political development. On the contrary, the 2006 local elections led to a sharp political and electoral decline.

Dillen embodied the most right-wing current of the Volksunie and its most extra-institutional wing. Most of the VNP cadres were located in the Antwerp province, the cradle of Flemingantism and of the Flemish Extreme Right in the inter-war period (De Wever, 1994). Shortly after the foundation of the VNP, Lode Claes and people close to him launched the Vlaamse Volkspartij (VVP, Flemish People's Party). A former Parliamentarian of the Volksunie, Lode Claes was one of the conservative movement figures. The VVP was mainly present in Flemish Brabant. Despite divergent views, the two parties formed an electoral cartel for the 1978 elections, under the title "Vlaams Blok" (Flemish Blok). The results were disappointing. The Vlaams Blok reaped reasonable esteem scores at Antwerp and, to a lesser extent, in the Brabant. Yet, only Karel Dillen was elected at Antwerp; Lode Claes failed in Brussels. This mixed result and its asymmetrical translation for VNP and VVP led to the end of the cartel. The VVP ran alone in the 1979 European elections but was not successful, and it dissolved shortly afterwards. In order to welcome executives from the VVP, the VNP was transformed into the Vlaams Blok. Originally based on so-called community issues (relations between French-speaking and Dutch-speaking communities in Belgium), the Vlaams Blok gradually changed the focus of its propaganda as well as its identity towards fighting against immigration (Mudde, 2002), boosted in particular by the arrival of young professionals such as Gerolf Annemans and Filip Dewinter. Flanders' independence, as well as xenophobic and racist discourses, became the Vlaams Blok's two public leitmotifs (Swyngedouw & Ivaldi, 2001). In 1992, the adoption of a 70-point programme to solve the problem of foreigners stood as the culmination of this approach by the Vlaams Blok (1992). This led to the departure or exclusion of executives who believed the party's identity was strictly linked to the promotion of Flemish nationalism.
Since its inception, the Vlaams Blok has had three political and electoral lives.
Between 1981 and 1991, the party was mainly confined to its initial point of gravity, the province of Antwerp and even more precisely in the Antwerp municipality. The Vlaams Blok did not really manage to deploy outside this Antwerp core. A movement was underway in the 1987 legislative elections, but remained elusive. For the first time, the Vlaams Blok exceeded the 100,000 vote threshold (116,534). This progress was sustained in the 1989 European elections. With 241,117 votes, the Far-Right party managed to win one MEP. This progress was spectacularly achieved at November 1991 legislative elections, which ushered in a new phase in the party's history.
On this election, dubbed a Black Sunday (Mudde, 2002: p. 89), the Vlaams Blok gathered more than 400,000 votes. For the first time, it was ahead of the Volksunie. From that date on, the Vlaams Blok has continued to grow from an organisational, electoral, cultural and political point of view.
From an organisational point of view, the party has seen a significant increase in its membership. In four years, the party climbed from 4682 members to 9322, Blok "as a group or association that clearly and repeatedly advocates discrimination" (Brems, 2006: p. 705 Table 2). Little by little, the Vlaams Blok made progress   (Coffé, Heyndels, & Vermeir, 2007;Lubbers, Scheepers, & Billiet, 2000). From a cultural and political point of view, the Vlaams Blok undoubtedly raised many problems on the agenda of the Flemish and Belgian political scene (Pauwels, 2011). This is true of the whole matter of security issues from a law and order perspective (Mudde, 2002) and of all issues relating to migration and the place of the Muslim faith. In the Belgian context, the so-called institutional issue should be added: the relations between linguistic communities and between regions. Influenced as it was by the French New Right, the party attached specific importance to "cultural hegemony", and did not hesitate to refer to Gramsci in order to improve its cultural influence (Spruyt, 1995  Such a collapse in favour of the N-VA can be explained by the identity(ies) of the N-VA and its less sulfurous label than the Vlaams Belang's. Itsinitial identity brought it back to the Center vs Periphery cleavage (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967), often described as a linguistic cleavage in Belgium (Delwit, 2012). The N-VA was born out of the Volksunie; this organisation is the most faithful to the original themes and has declared its primary objective was the advent of the independence of a Flemish Republic (Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, 2018: p. 2). This reference to the peripheral side is expressed not only in the Belgian context but also  (Delwit, 2005;Cetrà & Liñeira, 2018) whose primary objectives are to promote decentralisation, ranging from the autonomy to the independence of the "European peoples", the cornerstone being the right to "self-determination 1 ". However, as of the 2010 federal election, a second identity feature emerged: the party's extremely neo-liberal position on socio-economic issues. It asserts itself in opposition to the government led by the socialist Elio Di Rupo. In 2014, the N-VA campaign was above all anti-socialist, marked by strong hostility to public regulation in economic and social affairs, and to the role of intermediary actors such as trade unions. Such positioning on the owner side of the owner vs worker cleavage has become an identifier and has been confirmed in the way of exercising public policies. Finally, the N-VA has recently revealed a third identity reference, which of a very ethnocentric party, focused on Law and Order themes (Bennett & Tuchfarber, 1975). Adam and Deschouwer (2016) showed how the N-VA evolved in its restrictive approach to immigration or asylum seekers. Moreover, from 2009 and 2010 onwards, some N-VA executives' comments bordered on xenophobia. This rhetoric was then interpreted precisely as the party's desire to attract an electorate that opted for the Vlaams Blok and then the Vlaams Belang. This operation seemed necessary to achieve central objectives: to win the Antwerp mayorship or to make the N-VA unavoidable after the federal and regional elections in spring 2014.Over time, what appeared only as language elements of the party's most right-wing personalities actually proved central. The N-VA has gradually emerged as a political formation promoting organic nationalism (Sternhell, et al., 1989) or identity nationalism (Müller, 2016), for which rejection of the other's figure has become nodal. In this respect, the behaviour of the former Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Theo Francken, has highlighted a neo-conservative, even reactionary and ethnocentric vision. Emblematically, the party agreed to sit at the European Parliament as a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) (Brack, 2018

Local Elections in Belgium
Since For this reason, the new parties cannot snub local elections if they wish to continue to exist. Yet, for any new party, participation in communal elections proves much more difficult in submitting a list than at the federal national level and, since 1995, at a regional level. The number of constituencies is much larger.
This, therefore, requires both a relatively large number of members likely to stand as candidates, as well as middle managers able to lead the lists and speak for the party in communal councils. Such necessities are already not easy for centripetal parties to meet. They are even more difficult for parties with a very strong and explosive ideological profile. The process of joining an Extreme Right-Wing Party is fraught with very negative connotations and can prove costly regarding family, professional or neighbourhood relations (van Haute & Gauja, 2015). And, the process of running for such a party increases the potential for such "costs" (Klandermans & Mayer, 2001 (Pilet, 2007).
These data on the capacity of the Vlaams Blok and then Vlaams Belang are at first glance evidence of the link between the national dimension of the electoral curve, the enrolment curve and the ability to build lists and submit them to voters. What about the results?

Results at Local Elections
In 1982, the Vlaams Blok went unnoticed. In 24 of the 25 municipalities where it was running, the party fell below 5% of the votes and, in most cases, far below that. Nevertheless, one exception was noteworthy. In the main Flemish municipality, Antwerp, the Far Right scored 5.2% and won two seats. These are the only two councilors won by the party out of the 800 in competition in the municipalities where it was running (7096 in Flanders). In 1988, in the context of an increase in the number of lists, we observe two movements. In several municipalities, the party was no longer confidential. In 39 of the 49 municipalities where it was running, the Vlaams Blok achieved a result of less than 5%, indeed; but in 9 of them, its result was in a range between 5% and 9.9%. Nevertheless, the most striking element was the strengthening of the Antwerp exception. The Vlaams Blok reached 17.7%, granting it 10 out of the 55 seats. This striking result enjoyed extensive media coverage and much political speculation. It was also considered as "one of the major events of this election" (Delruelle-Vosswinkel, Noël, Vanlaer, & Vandermotten, 1989). It was a crucial channel for increasing the visibility of the Vlaams Blok and other parties' reactions (Mudde, 1995: pp. 11-12).
Just a few weeks after the municipal election, the government set up an in- In terms of seat distribution, the Vlaams Blok also achieved its best performance. It failed to win seats in only 8 municipalities: Heers, Kortemark, Kruishoutem, Oosterzele, Oudenburg, Sint-Martens-Latem, Vleteren and Zuinkerke.
In the other municipalities, Vlaaams Belang took 792 of the 5736 seats in the municipalities where it was present (7311 in Flanders). The 2006 communal elections, therefore, marked a major step towards institutionalisation for the Vlaams Belang at the communal level (Ignazi, 1998

Electoral Geography
The

Power
Whatever      (Coffé, Heyndels, & Vermeir, 2007). This cordon sanitaire has nevertheless been, and still is, under pressure, for three main reasons. The

Conclusion
The analysis of the Vlaams Blok/Vlaams Belang's electoral performance at local elections can teach several lessons. Despite the major difficulties for a new party, with a more exacerbated polarity than in centripetal parties to achieve being an effective actor in local elections, we do not observe any discrepancy with the dy- to its electoral decline in this election. The average performance in the municipalities where it was introduced is significantly higher than in 2012. In the provincial elections that took place on the same day, this rebound was also observed. At the legislative, regional and European elections of May 2019, the Vlaams Belang confirmed its recovery. Hence, three municipal elections have been proved to be decisive political moments in the political development of the Flemish Extreme Right. Rather than offering apossible institutional or political wall, local elections proved to be milestones in the Vlaams Belang's lifespan (Pedersen, 1982). In three cases, local elections created a spillover effect for the Vlaams Belang; either as some leverage for an electoral breakthrough or upturn

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.