ABSTRACT
The electoral politics of Belgium is complicated by the country’s linguistic divisions into French and Flemish speaking components, with a small German speaking population in the south of the country. The replication of the existing communal cleavage within Belgium's new movement politics, with predominantly French and Flemish speaking Green parties existing side by side, serves to illustrate one of the abiding facts of Belgium's political culture. Both parties have from the start campaigned jointly in local and national election campaigns. As a consequence, the Flemish party, AGALEV, is regarded as somewhat more radical and rather less disposed to pure ecologism, than the Wallonian or French speaking ECOLO. For all of the radical proposals, ECOLO remained a party more at ease with organisational professionalism than with the movement idealism familiar to other Green parties in the earliest stages of their development.
