Linguistic Parties
A specific phenomenon in Belgium was the emergence of one-issue parties whose only reason for existence was the defence of the cultural, political, and economic interests of one of the linguistic groups or regions of Belgian society. See Flemish movement.
The most militant Flemish regional party in Parliament in the 1950s and 1960s, the Volksunie (VU), once drew nearly one-quarter of Belgium's Dutch-speaking electorate away from the traditional parties. The Volksunie was in the forefront of a successful campaign by the country's Flemish population for cultural and political parity with the nation's long dominant French-speaking population. However, in recent elections the party has suffered severe setbacks. In October 2001 the party disintegrated. The left-liberal wing founded Spirit, later called the Social Liberal Party, while the more traditional Flemish nationalist wing continued under the banner Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA). After a disappointing result in the regional elections of 2009, the Social Liberal Party decided to fuse with the Flemish ecologists of Groen!
The Fédéralistes Démocrates Francophones (FDF) is a Brussels French-speaking Belgian political party that aims to defend and expand linguistic rights of French-speaking people in and around Brussels. It has affiliated with the Mouvement Réformateur, a liberal alliance party.
The Union des Francophones (UF) is an electoral list combining the major Belgian Francophone parties for the regional elections.
Read more about this topic: Political Parties In Belgium
Famous quotes containing the words linguistic and/or parties:
“It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say “that is red” instead of “that reddens,” either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“I care nothing for all the political parties in the world except as they stand for justice.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)