Today we (well, not me as I don’t have a Belgian nationality) shall vote in Belgium. We will be voting on a Federal level, Regional (Flanders, Wallonia, Brussels) level and European level.
Chances are likely to have at least a far right nationalist government on the Flanders level, though Federal might be just as bad even. The nationalist want Flanders to become independent, so it will be interesting to see what happens. They are extremely anti LGBTQ+ and anti immigration, though ‘coincidentally’ not against my kind of immigration. Many of my friends in both categories are scared and frankly, being a member of the communist party, so am I.
For us it looks like we will at least double the amount of votes compared to last time. Polls have us at 10% but I think it might be higher. 21% of the voters still don’t have a clue. And voting is mandatory here, so they need to have one today.
My own group managed to convince 5000 people in the last weeks by going into the streets and talking to people. Every day for the last few weeks has been spent by reaching out to as much people as possible and we did it. As far as I could see we were the only party to do it this way. Others would arrive in a big ass campaign bus, in suits and whatnot. We would be there, ordinary locals to talk to.
What the future will hold, nobody knows. All we know is that our struggle isn’t over and we continue to give it all.
Wait there is a Trot party in Ireland? We got one too but they are very small and actually urged people to vote for us instead, so that was nice of them.
I can vote for EU here but I apparently had to register in Belgium for that, which I didn’t know. I had to vote for a Dutch candidate instead.
PBP-Solidarity. Paul Murphy, Richard Boyd-Barret etc. They were polling at 10% in Dublin, which is a large electoral region.
They do a lot of good, when they’re not chauvinistically condescending to the global south and parroting western propaganda re AES states. I honestly think they mean well, they’re just the usual would-be Marxist Leninists if they were able to climb out from under their cold war propaganda indoctrination.
I had the same issue in NL, wasn’t aware that I had to register.