Belgium's Prime Minister Alexander De Croo is preparing to resign after a significant defeat for his liberal party Open VLD in the parliamentary election held concurrently with the EU election.
The loss was not unexpected. Opinion polls have long indicated that the current six-party coalition between liberals, social democrats and greens will not maintain its majority.
The biggest winner in the Belgian election was instead the Flemish separatist party NVA, which managed to keep the far-right party Vlaams Belang a considerable distance behind, both nationally and regionally, despite opinion polls having long pointed to the opposite.
On the French-speaking side, the liberal party MR and the left-wing party PTB made significant progress. The government formation in divided Belgium will now, as usual, take a long time. It last took 1.5 years for a new government to be formed after the 2019 election.
