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c h a p t e r f i v e Belgium The parliamentary elections of May 24, 1936 accelerated the process of destabilization of the Belgian regime that had been ongoing for some years. Three parties, Rex, the VNV and the Communists, which held together a fourth of the seats in the Chamber, did not accept the fundamentals of the parliamentary regime. Their influence reached beyond the boundaries of their parties. Then followed a turbulent time of conspiracies and coalitions (concentraties), agitation from the left, but first of all from the right. This process of destabilization would be put under control only in the summer of 1937. — e m m a n u e l g é r a r d , De katholieke partij in crisis In 1936–39, the Belgian democratic system had to confront its most turbulent years since World War I, its very existence put in danger by the conquest of almost a quarter of the seats in the lower chamber by three ideologically antisystem parties: Rex, the Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV), and the Communist Party (PCB). Of these, the first two—Rex in particular—given their size, their aggressive political style, and their ability to cause deep divisions within the governing majority and most of all within the Catholic Party, were characterized by relational anti-systemness too. Although the Communists doubled their share of seats in the 1936 national elections, they were unable to engender serious divisions within the ‘‘ideologically bordering’’ Socialist Party—although a small minority within that party emerged to advocate a Popular Front on the French and Spanish models of the time—and hence were unable to endanger the system seriously from the extreme left. At the right end of the political spectrum, on the other hand, the situation was very di√erent: for a short but significant period, dynamic Rexist leader Leon Degrelle managed to attack the Catholic politicians—which had traditionally been in government for many decades—and in so doing attract a large number of Catholic Belgium 109 votes, as he pursued his declared goal of taking over the democratic system. At the same time, the success of the Flemish nationalist VNV in Flanders gave authoritarian and völkisch political expression to a longstanding cleavage of Belgian society. Belgian democracy survived these challenges thanks to two factors: first, the strong commitment of the Catholic Party to cooperation with the Liberals and the Socialists, in Belgium called the Belgian Workers’ Party (Parti Ouvrière Belge, POB), although in an unstable and ideologically heterogeneous coalition; and second, the promptness showed by institutional actors in perceiving and reacting to the potential danger represented by the Rexists. As in the cases of Czechoslovakia and Finland, the coalition strategy of the border party, in this case the Catholic Party, proved decisive in determining the final outcome of the crisis. As the analysis below shows in more detail, the decision to continue cooperation with the other parties of government through the crisis was opposed by a strong internal minority of the party—which favored defection from the government and pursued a di√erent political coalition that included Rex and the VNV—and could be maintained only at the cost of continuous internal struggles. The two main factors characterizing a border party are present in the Catholic Party during the 1936–39 crisis. First of all, both Rex and the VNV owed their success in the 1936 elections to votes coming largely from the Catholic Party, which had traditionally been the largest Belgian party—before those elections. The party lost about 400,000 votes to Rex and the VNV, about a quarter of its total vote of four years earlier. Secondly, the party had a de facto veto power on the constitution of any democratic coalition. It has been maintained that the internal destabilization of the Catholic Party, for di√erent reasons already a factor before 1936, can be considered the main cause of the destabilization of Belgian democracy in those years. The very fact that this party had unclear boundaries and a very flexible internal structure accompanied by loose discipline had allowed the system to survive its own endemic instability. The massive electoral losses of 1936 intervened at a moment in which the party was undergoing a process of internal reorganization and led to disbandment within its cadres, so that for some time the risk of its dissolution in di√erent formations was real (Gérard 1985). Had this happened , or had the party...

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