BELGIAN ELECTIONS
‘BRUSSELS. --- In Belgium's municipal elections October ll, the -government coalition of Social. Democrats and Catholics (Social. Christians) suffered a severe setback, The Catholics were particularly hard hit. Although the final count in the more than 2,000 municipalities is still to be announced officially, it is clear that the..vote for the Social Democrats was down 3.5% (from 38% of the total to 34.5%) while the. vote for the Catholics was down 5.5% (from 40.5% to 34%). The Social Democratic leadership therefore had the dubious satisfaction of seeing their party becoming technically the strongest in the country due to smaller losses than the Social Christians. - The. official Communist party (pro-Moscow) made modest gains throughout the country, recovering from. the losses suffered in 1958 and regaining the level held in 1952. In the Borinage, however, which has been in economic decline since the coal-mining crisis of 1958-59, the Communist party registered considerable gains, repeating its success in the 1961 general elections. The over-all vote for. the Communist party was nonetheless very low, some 3.5% of the electorate, a gain of 1. 5%.
- The. unofficial Communist party (pro-Peking) ran a big. slate but generally drew only a small vote. There were two important exceptions. In the Brussels region, where the party won nearly onethird of the membership of the old organization, it also received one-third of the Communist vote. In the Charleroi region, it outdistanced the official party in several townships, among them Charleroi itself. The over-all vote for the unofficial Communist party was 0.3% of the electorate.
Since the Social Democrats lost more votes than the Communists won, the election can be. judged as having registered a slight swing to the right. This is particularly true of Brussels, where the right-wing Liberal party chalked up gains, and Antwerp where the Flemish nationalists scored, The shift away from the Catholics is due:to wide dissatisfaction among the middle classes over the financial and tax policies of the coalition government, The swing away from the Social Democrats to the Communists in the industrial areas reflects. dissatisfaction among advanced workers over govern-_ ment measures designed to.appease big business (e.g., support for antistrike laws in 1962), a With a “tendency now evident among the middle class to move to the right and the working .class to move to the left, the.. Social Democratic party leaders are in a quandary over how to limit losses in the general elections next year.
Their first move was to try to block the membership from engaging in any truly critical examination of general policies. This was done by launching a witch-hunt against leaders of the left
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wing. The secretary of the Liége trade-union federation, Jacques Yerna, legal editor of the weekly La Gauche has been threatened with expulsion; the leadership of the Socialist Youth have been placed on- the carpet charged with gross indiscipline.
It remains to be seen if the right wing can get away with this diversionist maneuver. The attack against the left wing will hardly sit well with the rank and file, particularly since: leftwing candidates did exceptionally well in the municipal elections. Between six and twelve municipalities will have a left-wing Socialist administration when the final count is in. All the left Socialist members of parliament who supported La Gauche will thus become mayors of their respective towns, thereby greatly strengthening their positions,