Abstract
Belgium's federal election of 26 May 2019 saw large gains for Vlaams Belang on the Flemish radical right and for the PVDA-PTB on the radical left. I use 95,373 posts from the Facebook pages of 121 Belgian politicians, mostly members of the 2019 Chamber of Representatives and federal ministers, from January 2014 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle. In the month before the election, the pages of Vlaams Belang politicians drew 48% of all interactions on these pages, against 12% of the national vote. Three pages, those of Tom Van Grieken, Theo Francken and Dries Van Langenhove, drew 62% of all interactions between them. Dutch-speaking politicians' pages drew nine times as many interactions as French-speaking politicians' pages, so I compare parties within each language community. Among Dutch-speaking parties, Vlaams Belang drew 2.7 times its share of the vote and the PVDA 1.9 times, while N-VA drew about its share and Christian Democrats, Liberals and Greens drew about a fifth or less. Among French-speaking parties, the PTB drew 2.9 times its share, the PS about its share (1.1) and the MR a little less (0.8). Over time, engagement moved from N-VA, whose State Secretary for Asylum and Migration, Francken, had the largest page in 2016 to 2018, to Vlaams Belang, whose share of all interactions rose from 1% in 2014 to 47% in 2019 and 56% in 2020. The list does not include several party leaders, so the results describe the politicians in the list, not whole parties.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Loudest at the Edges: Belgian Politicians on Facebook and the 2019 Election. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396436