PS Chairman Paul Magnette wants to reconfirm cordon sanitaire
Paul Magnette, chairman of the Parti Socialiste (PS), wants to reconfirm the cordon sanitaire against the extreme right "together with the other democratic French-speaking parties", he told RTL-TVi on Friday.
The reason for the PS chairman's proposal is the uproar that arose in French-speaking Belgium after the liberal chairman Georges-Louis Bouchez (MR) appeared on Flemish public television on Thursday in a debate with Vlaams Belang chairman Tom Van Grieken. With his performance, Bouchez violated, according to many, the so-called cordon médiatique, which stipulates that French-speaking parties - unlike Flemish parties - do not enter into debate with extreme parties.
PS chairman Paul Magnette said he was deeply shocked by Bouchez's action. "This is a political mistake and a serious precedent. Twenty years ago, our predecessors in the democratic French-speaking parties signed an agreement in which they said they would not negotiate or debate with the extreme right. Mr Bouchez has violated that agreement," he told RTL-TVi.
Magnette's fellow party member and State Secretary Thomas Dermine also reacted:
"There is a reason why the extreme right has 30% of the vote in France and 25% in Flanders: the cordon sanitaire. There are scientific studies that show that excluding the extreme right from the political debate ensures that those extreme right parties remain small. Georges-Louis Bouchez knows this too, yet he made the conscious choice to enter into debate with Tom Van Grieken. I regret his choice."
Despite the commotion, the liberal chairman maintains that he is not to blame.
"We defeated (the far-right parties) by debating and refuting their arguments, not by silencing them," Bouchez reacted.
He was also supported in this by the Flemish liberal chairman of Open VLD, Egbert Lachaert.
"In a democracy, you have to be able to have a debate with everyone. Bouchez did an excellent job of that against Tom Van Grieken, who had no useful arguments or solutions", he reported on Twitter.
The PS Chairman now wants to meet with the other French-speaking parties to reconfirm the cordon sanitaire. The fact that French-speaking Belgium, unlike Flanders or France, has so far been able to hold off the advance of the extreme right is owed to the fact that the extreme right has never been standardised, he said.
© Belga Photo Hatim Kaghat - PS chairman Paul Magnette delivers a speech at a congres of french-speaking socialist party PS in Braine l'Alleud, on Sunday 13 March 2022.