The Left in Flanders is in a tizzy after the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party, inspired by Hungary’s demographic approach to public spending, proposed incentivising couples to have children.
With Belgium’s June 9th elections fast approaching, and Vlaams Belang topping the latest polls by a wide margin (securing a commanding 28% of the vote), leftist establishment parties are doing their utmost to publicize the supposed ‘far-right’ threat Vlaams Belang presents in the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.
The Left’s latest slander—in an obvious ploy to appeal to what they believe will attract women voters—focuses on how Vlaams Belang could tackle the dire birthrate which, like all across Europe, is below replacement level, prompting fears of a demographic crisis: In the past ten years, the number of live births in Flanders dropped from 1.81 to 1.53 children per woman.
De Standaard, Flanders’ paper ‘of record,’ was most dishonest in its misleading coverage. A recent headline read “Vlaams Belang pushes women to have children before the age of 30”—the exact opposite of what the party in fact proposes. Freedom of choice in the matter is absolute—but this is a fact the paper cares to mention only several paragraphs into the story.
The newspaper quotes socialist Vooruit MP Freya Van den Bossche, who in a recent interview decried the “very conservative revival” our time is seeing, in which “more and more voices are calling for sending women back to the hearth.” She labeled as “creepy” the Vlaams Belang proposal to grant women who opt to have “many children at a young age” more financial assistance, i.e., doubling the one-time birth premium (from €1,200 to €2,400) when the mother is younger than 30 at the time of her child’s birth.
In its party program, Vlaams Belang notes that “encouraging earlier births is a legitimate objective as it corresponds to biological reality, and thus contributes to the health of the woman and child.”
Vooruit’s Minister of Development Cooperation and Urban Policy Caroline Gennezlater retweeted the article, adding a cliché: “The 1950s have called; they want their view of women back”—just shy from going all-in by citing the ‘barefoot women slaving away in the kitchen while pregnant’ trope.
Not to be outdone by the socialists, the Greens turned out in Brussels last Sunday in Handmaid’s Tale garb—the distinctive red robes with a white hood as described and seen in Margareth Atwood’s dystopian novel and later television adaptation—in what was a bogus call for women’s rights to be protected. In the piece of fiction, women are treated as property under a totalitarian regime, and forced into having children—the exact opposite of the Vlaams Belang proposal.
In a reaction to the crude allegations in De Standaard, Vlaams Belang fired back by reiterating its belief in the “primacy of freedom of choice,” stating that “there is no such thing as having too few or too many children.”
Barbara Pas, the Vlaams Belang leader in the Flemish parliament, argued that the Flemish “are currently faced with a false choice” between choosing either to “make a career or start a family.”
Citing figures from the Flemish government, Pas went on to illustrate how the “desire to have children generally remains the same, but that our people are unable to fulfill it,” as they are impeded “because of practical and financial obstacles,” and due to the work-family balance “being completely absent.” These obstacles, she concludes, are “precisely what Vlaams Belang seeks to eliminate.”
Given that it sees the family as the “cornerstone of any society,” the party concluded that it is “right” to invest in it.