ABSTRACT
The Belgian party system has been fairly fragmented and open to new parties. However, the integration of new parties into national-federal governments has been limited. The Belgian political system, characterised by pillarisation and consociationalism (Delwit et al. 1999), encourages the three traditional party families (Christian Democrats, Socialists and Liberals) to share power amongst them, and to limit the access of new parties to power. Consequently, welcoming new parties in government is relatively rare. Nevertheless, consociationalism as crisis management has sometimes encouraged the traditional parties to incorporate new parties into the old ones in order to solve a crisis, or to stabilise the political system after the emergence of a new cleavage (Deschouwer 2002). Three cases of this can be found since the end of the Second World War (Magnette 2000): neounionist coalitions,1 the regionalist coalitions,2 and the rainbow coalition.3
