Belgian far-right makes strong gains in poll

Strong gains in Belgium's municipal elections on Sunday by the ultra-nationalist Vlaams Blok (VB) represent another significant gain for the European farright in a year which brought Austria's Freedom Party into power. Fears of precisely such a result had led to strong Belgian support for the diplomatic isolation of Austria by its 14 EU partners.

The VB, which has had paramilitary connections in the past, has a virulently anti-immigrant message and plays on the linguistic divisions of the country, saw its vote in Belgium's second largest city, Antwerp, rise five percentage points to 33 per cent.

"The black oil spill is spreading from Antwerp in an ever wider circle around the city," said the Flemish newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.

In Ghent it attracted one in five voters while in the town of Mechelen, just north of Brussels, VB pushed its vote up to 26 per cent. It polled an estimated 10 per cent in the whole of Flanders.

In Antwerp the party took 20 seats - an increase of two - on the 55-seat council whose ruling five-party coalition was reduced to 35 seats. VB's charismatic leader in the city, Mr Filip Dewinter, scored a remarkable 50,000 personal votes in a city of 460,000 people.

But Belgium's democratic parties remain determined not to enter power-sharing arrangements with the VB, and in Antwerp the

????Socilaist mayor, Ms Leona Detiege, seems certain to retain her job despite claims by Mr Dewinter that he can put together a new coalition.

Mr Dewinter insisted that Ms Detiege should "draw her own conclusions" from Sunday's results and "get out". "We now have the weapons in hand to block" the functioning of the council, he said.

But the successes of the VB were not matched in Wallonia, where the far-right lost the few seats it controlled.

While its vote will be seen as a setback for the new Liberal-Socialist-Green government the real losers in vote terms were the Social Christian parties. In Brussels, however, control passed from a Liberal-led coalition to one combining Socialists, Greens and Social Christians.