Flemish nationalist leader Bart De Wever appeared set for a breakthrough win in Belgian local elections on Sunday, moving well ahead in the key northern city of Antwerp, the country’s economic heart.
With a nearly a third of the votes counted shortly after 6 pm (1600 GMT), De Wever’s New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) had 37.4 percent in Antwerp, the giant port city where he was aiming to end some 90 years of Socialist rule.
His Socialist rival had around 29.1 percent, according to Flanders government figures.
The vote is the latest chapter in a tussle between Belgium’s Dutch- and French-speaking halves.
On the eve of the election, De Wever told a rally that “the Flemish have had enough of being treated like cows only good for their milk,” lambasting the Socialist-run, French-speaking and largely poorer south.
If the preliminary outcome is confirmed, then De Wever, 41, will be well placed to confront a central government in Brussels led by Socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo which he considers “illegitimate”.
“It’s a personal failure for Elio Di Rupo,” said Olivier Maingain of the FDF party of Francophone federalists as the results came in.
“It’s dramatic but it was predictable,” Maingain said, looking ahead to the inevitable strains likely in the run-up to 2014 general elections, with De Wever seeking to re-negotiate a “confederal” restructuring of the state.
“It looks like (De Wever) has won his bet to make the big breakthrough,” said Pascal Delwit, a political scientist at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
Across Flanders, the wealthier north of the country and home to some six-million people, the N-VA was scoring 20-30 percent, compared with just five percent in the last municipal polls six years ago.
Some 7.8 million voters were picking councillors and mayors at regional level across essentially Dutch-speaking Flanders, mostly French-speaking Wallonia and the federal Brussels capital region.
De Wever had told AFP on the hustings that he was using the elections as a calculated “stepping stone” aimed at pressuring what he considers an “illegitimate” central government.
Keeping a low profile throughout the campaign, Di Rupo and other Belgian parties supporting a unitary state in the fragile, six-party coalition, sought to avoid rising to De Wever’s baiting.
Analysts had said an N-VA victory in Antwerp would be hugely important in shaping the run-up to 2014 and that now appears to be on the cards.
The vote is also being closely followed as the eurozone debt crisis tests loyalties in the European Union.
Catalonia is pushing for fiscal autonomy from Spain going into November 25 elections, while on Monday, British Prime Minister David Cameron will sign terms in Edinburgh with the leader of Scotland’s government on a 2014 referendum on full independence.
Belgium has a complicated proportional voting system which means much horse-trading to find coalitions will now take place.
With the Socialists having run Antwerp for 90 years, De Wever fully realised the stakes in going for broke there.
“If we can take Antwerp, then we are waking up in a different country,” he told AFP a week before the polls.
De Wever had described the vote as “do-or-die” for his movement, and said that tensions between the prosperous Flemish north, which generally votes to the right, and the Walloon south run by what he described as irresponsible, free-spending Socialists, were driving a “democratic revolt.”
Flanders “clearly wants to go the German way,” De Wever told AFP on the hustings, while Wallonia “wants to go the Latin way”.
Flemish nationalists set for big election breakthrough
