The battle of Antwerp: a politics of community or personality?

In the country known as the home of European politics, local politics have taken centre-stage. This weekend's elections in Belgium saw broad gains for the far-right, anti-immigration party Vlaams Belang (VB) in the Flemish-speaking north. Old industrial towns and rural hamlets in Flanders swept the Vlaams into municipal power at the expense of parties in the ruling centre-left coalition. The nationalist party's gains (up from 14.9% to 20% of council seats in the province) have even forced admissions of gloom from PM Guy Verhofstadt and fuelled fresh reports of the rise of the right in Europe.

Yet VB's failure to make significant headway in Antwerp (Belgium's second city) is being heralded as a victory by its opponents and a product of the efforts of Patrick Janssens, incumbent Antwerp mayor. For the last five years, diverse Antwerp has been buffeted by communal politics and the volatile debate over immigration. VB, which already controlled one-third of the city's municipal council, was poised to strengthen its hold before this weekend's polls as the party (often compared to the Nazis and fascists) even appealed to the city's ancient Jewish community. Janssens, however, had other plans, leading a "rainbow coalition" that succeeded in checking the nationalists' advance; the Socialists overtook VB as the largest party in the city.

With VB slowed in Antwerp, we are told, Belgium's "political class" breathed a haggard sigh of relief. Janssens' success is not, however, a credit to the liberal old guard. What is striking about such results in Antwerp (and throughout Europe in recent years) is the extent to which populism and the cult of personality are jolting politics out of its slumber.

The battle of Antwerp, between the Vlaams and their opponents, was billed as a duel between the iconic Filip Dewinter (VB leader) and Janssens. In his "US-style" campaign, Janssens placed great emphasis on building an image of himself, deemphasising the importance of his party. Just as the VB rest on a platform of anti-immigration, Janssens, in effect, transcended party loyalties in his retaliatory platform of anti-anti-immigration.

Issue-based politics, distance from the petty affinities of established parties, and the magnification of the political individual – these are the symptoms of an undeniable resurgence of European populism.

Such politics definitively surfaced in the meteoric rise of Dutch firebrand Pim Fortuyn and later (albeit less directly) in the two-thirds majority Dutch rejection of the EU constitution. Though outside observers panned the Dutch as myopic for their No-votes, the referendum, in the end, damned not Europe but the bleak political landscape of the Low Country itself, filled as it was with innocuous leaders and stagnating parties. Pim Fortuyn, despite (indeed, as a result of) his prickly views, won popularity in life as a leader of convictions and originality. Even Dutch wary of his bluntness grudgingly admitted that Fortuyn – homosexual, outspoken, dog-walking – added spice, instilling excitement into the political scene. In death, he achieved a political martyrdom barely eclipsed by the slain (and equally cuddly) Theo van Gogh.

Like Dewinter and Janssens' Antwerp, Fortuyn's Rotterdam (a third of which's municipal seats were controlled by his party, just like the VB in Antwerp) was also a heated battleground for the forces of anti-immigration and anti-anti-immigration, and became a flashpoint for all Dutch politics.

It remains unlikely that any party or political campaigner defining itself around a single issue (i.e. immigration) will ever rise to the top of the parliamentary pile. But their impact on the immovable grey ladies of continental politics – Socialists, Christian Democrats, Liberals – is already assured. It will be more than interesting to see how the established parties cope not only with populist "movements" (be it the likes of the VB or Abu Jahjah's Arab European League), but with the populist "impulse".