In Belgium, several Walloon municipalities are reconsidering their twinning arrangements with French towns that are now led by the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party, following France's local elections in March.
The municipalities of Huy (Liège province) and Namur (Namur province) are cutting ties with their twin towns in France: Grenay in the north and Menton in the south, respectively. They are doing so under Belgium's cordon sanitaire, which allows political parties and media outlets to systematically exclude far-right parties.
"Meeting with Rassemblement National elected representatives is a red line," Huy mayor Christophe Collignon (PS) told Le Monde.
In 2016, then-mayor of Grenay Christian Champiré reached out to Collignon, who had just been elected as Huy's mayor a few months earlier, to establish a link between the two towns. In 2022, this link led to a "friendship pact" followed by a "twinning pledge" in 2024.
This means that the two municipalities aimed to "maintain permanent ties and encourage exchanges between their residents to foster, through greater mutual understanding, a living sense of European fraternity".
But after Grenay elected RN candidate Daisy Duveau during France's local elections (with 42.43% of the vote in the second round) in March, things changed considerably for Collignon. During a council meeting on 13 May, the municipality of Huy decided to break the pact.
"For us, anyone who integrates into our society is welcome; we advocate openness to the world," Collignon told the Conversely, France's RN "embodies the rejection of others", he said, adding that it is "incompatible with our values".
Huy mayor Christophe Collignon (PS). Credit: Belga/Didier De Hoe
Interestingly, Huy is not the only town reconsidering its twinning arrangement with a municipality recently won over by the RN; Namur (the capital of Wallonia) is doing the same.
On 21 April, Namur decided to end its 70-year twinning arrangement with Menton (Alpes-Maritimes), following the latter's election of the RN candidate, Alexandra Masson.
The Belgian city's municipal council decided to "suspend, as a precautionary measure and with immediate effect, relations between the city of Namur and the city of Menton, in their institutional capacity".
Since 2006, Namur City Council has been led by the centrist Les Engagés (known as cdH at the time). As soon as the results of the first round of the municipal elections in France were known this year, the party issued instructions "to suspend twinning arrangements with municipalities led by extremist parties".
"They endanger our model of society and our ability to live together," Yvan Verougstraete, leader of Les Engagés and MEP (Renew), told Le Monde.
Cordon sanitaire
To justify this distancing, the mayors cite the political 'cordon sanitaire' that has been in place in Belgium for over 30 years now, aiming to to exclude the far-right from any political majority.
This cordon – sometimes referred to as a firewall – is a long-standing agreement between Belgium's political parties not to enter into government with the far-right, following a surprise win by the Flemish far-right Vlaams Blok (now Vlaams Belang) in 1991.
While the agreement does not cover "twinning towns", the symbolism carries over. In 2014, the Walloon municipalities of Arlon and Farciennes already suspended their arrangements with the towns of Hayange (Moselle) and Beaucaire (Gard), after these were won by the French far-right that year.
"All democratic parties are committed to this," said Collignon. "We have grown up in this political culture, and there can be no question of compromising on it."
