ABSTRACT
From the 1970s a series of constitutional reforms progressively transformed the Belgian unitary state into a federal one and today, indeed, the first article of the Belgian constitution stipulates that ‘Belgium is a federal state made up of Communities and Regions’. As the result of federal reforms, each community and region has developed a substantially different political culture: the profile of key political players, the parties in power themselves and the issues which divide them, the political alliances they formed, all have evolved in different directions. It is not surprising, then, that the place of extreme-right parties, their profiles and discourses on the Belgian political stage vary greatly depending on whether one is analysing the Dutch-speaking Flemish region in the north of the country, the bilingual Brussels capital region or the French-speaking Walloon region in the south. 1
