by LAETITIA RISS & WILLIAM BOUCHARDON
For the Marxist Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB), electoral success doesn’t come at the expense but because of building strong organisation.
While the PTB’s electoral performance has been encouraging, the party refuses to rest on its laurels and play politics according to the polls.
A few metres from the North Sea, in the Flemish town of Ostend, the Belgian Workers’ Party (PTB) celebrated its political comeback last September with a major Manifiesta attended by 15,000 people. The programme included a number of international guests, including British MP Jeremy Corbyn, American trade unionist Shawn Fain and French journalist Serge Halimi, as well as political, cultural and sports workshops for party supporters. Throughout all the debates, there was one common thread: reclaiming the heritage of Marxism and working to rebuild it.
In this way, the PTB aims to be more offensive than the French Communist Party (PCF), which has faltered and received weak electoral results. Time after time, the radical left party has demonstrated its growing capacity to organise the working class in various bodies, on the model of the mass parties of the 20th century. Beyond electoral campaigns, which are seen as just another way of politicising people, the party’s president, Raoul Hedebouw, gave a clear reminder of the PTB’s objectives: to “awaken class consciousness” and to enable “the people to structure themselves, against atomisation” in order to “materialise counter-power”.
A Party That Cannot Be Ignored
While the PTB has become a major party in Belgian politics, there is still much to be done. In the elections on 9 June — when Belgians elected their national, regional and European MPs — the PTB made new progress. It sent a second member to the European Parliament, went from 12 to 15 seats nationally and considerably improved its representation in the Brussels region and in Flanders, going from 11 to 16 and from 4 to 9 elected members respectively. For the first time, the party was even consulted by the King of Belgium with a view to joining the government, although this was quickly ruled out by all the other parties.
As such, the PTB had good reason to celebrate this successful campaign. Its grassroots mobilisation in Flanders undoubtedly helped to divert part of the working class from voting for the far right, which had been predicted as the winner in this part of the country for several months. While the Vlaams Belang (Flemish pro-independence far-right) has long been established, the PTB (known as the PVDA in Flanders) has succeeded, at the cost of a great deal of investment by and into its militants, in embodying an alternative for voters angry at the status quo. By placing second in Antwerp, the major port city in the north, the party even surprised in a city often described as a bastion of the right.
The only fly in the ointment was a slight setback in Wallonia, where the left as a whole lost votes as a consequence of a successful campaign led by the Mouvement Réformateur (right) and its ambitious president Georges-Louis Bouchez. Admittedly, the PTB had focused particularly on Flanders this year in order to rebalance its forces across the country, which was essential for it as the only party defending Belgian unity. However, major mobilisation efforts will be needed to regain a foothold in Wallonia, which, although it does not have a far-right party, has been seduced by the rhetoric of an increasingly conservative MR that has skilfully reappropriated the ‘value of work’ by pitting workers against the unemployed. According to the Right, the Socialist Party is deliberately keeping these people on welfare, thereby securing an electoral clientele.
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