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Showing posts from June, 2022

Roger Nols: Quasher of Minority Rights

  How Belgium’s  Trump-avant-la-lettre  Employed Xenophobia to Win Elections in the Seventies Roger Nols was a French-speaking politician known for his controversial attitude towards the Flemish minority in Brussels, and later on in his career his xenophobic views on immigration. Starting his career as a member of the liberal party, he eventually would co-found a party aimed towards representing the French-speaking majority in Brussels, the Front des Francophones (‘FDF’). Towards the end of his career, Nols main ideological selling points were more and more focused on immigration. He founded the Brussels division of the well-known extreme right-wing Front National (‘FN’), and was a great admirer of its French president Jean-Marie Le Pen.    It was Nols's phlegmatic style that still earns him a place in the minds (but not the hearts) of Brussels’ citizens today. Other, less polarising politicians sometimes get in the habit of bending the rules as well, but Nols h...