ABSTRACT

The history of the Belgian party system is a history of ever increasing fractionalization. Belgium has no national parties left, only regional parties. There are two Christian-Democratic parties, two Socialist parties and two Liberal parties. The Belgian Greens explicitly do not want to be "traditional" parties. They are looking for other and better structures to organize mass political participation. The green ideology is also well-known - it is an aggregation of new political values stressing quality of life and quality of democratic participation. If the Belgian parties AGALEV and ECOLO are called "green", it is precisely because they share this ideology. In 1987 AGALEV campaigned with a program that was explicitly adopted as a project concrete enough to be realized through active governmental participation. Another programatic feature of both green parties in Belgium consists of federalism. AGALEV and ECOLO want Belgium to become a real federal state.