RIGHTIST VICTORY IN BELGIUM The June Ist parliamentary elections in Belgium show on balance victory for the Social-Christian right. In the Senate it regained the absolute majority that it had lost in
In the Chamber, it failed of the same goal by very little; even so, it won eight seats, four from the Liberals, two from the Socialists, and two from the Communist Party. Overall, therefore, the bourgeois parties seats from the workers' parties; what is still more significant is that the Social-Christians and Flemish Nationalists together received 48.5% of the votes, the highest percentage since simple universal suffrage was established in 1919.
How is this victory of the right to be explained? It reflects the disappointment felt by part of the middle classes and of the workers toward the Socialist-Liberal coalition government that had been in power from 1954 to 1958. The discontent of the middle classes explains the shift of Liberal votes, the discontent of the workers that of Socialist votes, to the Parti Social-Chrétien. This shift is no doubt stronger
12 than appears from the election results, for it must be supoosed that the st at the same time that it was losing votes to the benefit of the clericals, was winning them away trom the CP. Despite the prosperity that Belgium has experienced hroughout most of the preceding legislative period, this dis ontent has quite specific objective causes. Belgian agricul ture, especially stock-raising, is going through a rather grave crisis. For a large number of small peasants, the income they derive from their farming is less than that of workers. Craftsmen and small traders are also having an uneasy time. They have a tendency, as in France, to blame social-security costs which they consider too "excessive" burden, etc. Indeed, semi-Poujadist currents have been showing themselves both inside the PSC and on its periphery. But it does seem that the majority of these discontented people wanted to make their vote "count," by voting finally for the PSC. As for the workers, they several times ran head on into the conservative policy of the Van Acker coalition government. This was particularly the case last year in public services, metallurgy, and the building trades. The most right-wing leaders of the reformist trade unions throughout the whole preceding period played the role of the government's direct agents, trying to avoid "labor conflicts that embarrass the government." On the other hand, the leaders of the Christian trade unions, strengthened by the opposition of the Social-Christian Party, did not fail to exploit this situation by taking the leadership of various struggles for labor's demands and by appearing in the eyes of some sectors of the working class as more militant and more dynamic than the reformist leaders. To this there is added the fact that, despite the opening of the Brussels Universal Exposition, the recession began to spread in Belgium ever since the beginning of 1958. Unemployment has increased in quite grave proportions. Now it has spread particularly in the regions where it had already been grave during the previous 1952-1953 recession; at that time the unemployed blamed the Social-Christian government and voted Socialist; this time they blamed the Socialist-Liberal government and voted PSC. By its June Ist setback, the Socialist Party was also paying for the total lack of programme in its election campaign. The PSC tackled it with certain demands that were of clearly socialist and working-class origin : increase in workers' pensions to the franc equivalent of $ 800 a year; reduction of military service to twelve months; fiscal adjustments for the benefit of the workers; etc. Instead of opposing to these demands still more popular demands (for example, free the social accomplishments of the preceding government. As a result, it became inevitable that part of the Socialist voters let themselves be won over by the tempting promises made by the PSC. Lastly, the political climate dominated by the "school war" unquestionably had a weight on the election results. The Belgian bourgeoisie governs the country thanks to the sup-
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL port won by its most powerful party, the Social-Christian Party, within the working class itself : for a large working-class sector, religious solidarity still counts for more than class solidarity. The reformist leaders thought they could modify this situation by guaranteeing lay education primacy over Catholic education. But in this way they permitted the clergy to play up religious solidarity heavily. This could have been weakened only by sufficiently broad social struggles or demands to bring out the manifestation of class solidarity. These struggles did not take place; these demands were not formulated; thus an election setback became inevitable. The government crisis opened by the June Ist elections has so far ended up in the formation of a homogeneous SocialChristian government led by Eyskens. This government is in the minority in the Chamber, in the majority in the Senate. It appears to be a transitional government; it can maintain itself only thanks to the benevolence of certain Liberals, thus preparing, at a later stage, the formation of a broader coalition government, Catholic-Liberal or even tripartisan. In fact the bourgeoisie has every reason to be satisfied with the new ministerial team, within which it has several of its most representative politicians. But it must avoid two dangers : first, that of social troubles which would occur in the recession grows worse (this is already the case in the coal industry, where 25,000 miners have been on strike for a week in the Liège region); next; that of a deterioration of the situation in the Congo, where the representatives of the native population have recently put forward more and more radical demands for self-administration. Within the workers' parties, the June Ist setback has produced a climate of uneasiness and discussion. The CP, one of the smallest in Europe, has lost two of its four deputies and a quarter of its votes, even in the regions where it was best rooted. It finds itself back at the weakest level of its past, that of the early '20s. Yet its leadership had swapped its extreme sectarianism of the "cold war" period for a servile opportunism, constantly lining up with the positions of the trade-union and reformist bureaucracy. But this policy, which allowed the Stalinists to increase their trade-union influence a little bit, proved not to pay off on the political level. The results of the Hungarian events, the CP's contradictory attitude toward the Van Acker government, and the clearer and clearer lack of delimitation from the reformists -these are the causes of this defeat. In fact, the Belgian CP no longer offers the workers the perspective of a workers' leadership in replacement of that of the Belgian SP; nor does it offer them the perspective of the building of a replacement leadership within the Belgian SP. It no longer has any perspectives at all. As for the Socialist Party, the voices criticizing the right-wing policy followed by the Van Acker government are growing
Louder, and the rudene also mine it puts the
emphasis on structural reforms. But they do not yet understand that this change of policy is impossible without a change of leadership, and that this change of leadership would soon clash with the nature and the fierce resistance of the reformist bureaucracy.