Vlaams Belang, Belgium's most misogynistic party ever, says women's council

Vlaams Belang, Belgium's most misogynistic party ever, says women's council

Vlaams Belang, the big winner in last Sunday’s election, is Belgium's most anti-woman party ever, the Conseil des femmes francophones de Belgique (CFFB) said on Thursday.

It “remains faithful to its anti-constitutional, anti-Belgian, anti-democratic DNA and with a steadfastness that borders on obsessive, homophobic and anti-women,” historian Sylvie Lausberg, president of the feminist organisation, commented one day after Vlaams Belang was received by Belgium’s king.

For the CFFB – in English ‘Council of French-speaking Women of Belgium’ – the “males” of the extreme-right party “have succeeded in furthering their agenda : shaking the hand of the Head of State, pushing out the first two women elected on their lists, immediately replaced by men, and calling into question nothing less than equality between men and women”.

In this connection, the Council recalled that Vlaams Belang leader Tom Van Grieken had said on Radio 1 that “fifty percent of women in politics is too much”.

Lausberg also recalled the stand of the party, then called Vlaams Blok, on the law decriminalising the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. A few months after the vote on the law in 1990, the extreme-right party had tabled another bill aimed at re-criminalising medical interventions of that nature. At the time, it had denounced the law as vindicating the “emotional state of mind of women” and called for a generalised ban on the voluntary interruption of pregnancies.

Vlaams Blok went on to re-table its bill in 1992, 1996, 1999 and 2003. After it was dissolved in 2004, its successor, Vlaams Belang, continued proposing the bill in 2007, 2008 and 2011, the CFFB recalled.

“There is no doubt that that party’s 18 representatives in the Federal Parliament will not stop” there, the Council stated. “No, they’ve wasted no time, contesting – as soon as the microphones were turned on – Article 11bis of the Constitution, which guarantees women and men equal exercise of their rights and freedoms as well as parity in institutions,” Lausberg said.

“Vlaams Belang needs to be outlawed immediately,” she added.

The Brussels Times


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