TITLE:
Belgian Communism in the Light of Its Vanishing (1976-1994)
AUTHORS:
Pascal Delwit
KEYWORDS:
Belgian Communism, Party Politics, Belgian Politics, Radical Left Parties, Communist Party, Communist Party of Belgium
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Political Science,
Vol.8 No.3,
July
30,
2018
ABSTRACT: In the 1987 national elections, the Communist Party of Belgium (PCB-KPB)
lost all parliamentary representation for the first time since 1925. This
failure reflects the accelerated collapse of Belgian Communism in just a decade.
The events of 1989 and 1991 in Central and Eastern Europe and in the USSR will
then confirm the de facto disappearance of the PCB-KPB. The article goes back
to the roots of the decline of a medium-size Communist Party, but showed
political and social relevance from 1925 to 1985. The decline is due to the
industrial and socio-demographic dramatic changes. The paper also tackles the
political choices made in the seventies and eighties to understand it. In
particular, it embraces the internal paralysis of the party faced with the
challenges posed to all the European Communist Parties at this time, and its
inability to deal with them.