How should political parties deal with extremist parties? In some countries an accommodating approach prevails, while in Flanders-Belgium political actors pursue a much more repressive approach. Although the democratic coalition against Vlaams Belang (VB) is maintained, the effectiveness and legitimacy of the exclusion politics is regularly under discussion. Mostly, the political or normative debate is at the forefront, while there is little attention to public opinion. In this article we try to determine how citizens think about the cordon sanitaire using in-depth interviews. The results show that attitudes towards exclusionary politics is based on pragmatism, strategy and principles. The pragmatic vision depends on citizen’s definition of the party and citizen’s assessment of the risks associated with the participation to government, while principled arguments are dependent of the fundamental meaning of democracy. Most VB voters do not consider the party VB as an antagonistic enemy, but an agonistic adversary and the true defender of the people, while most voters of the other parties still defend the legitimacy of the cordon sanitaire focusing on the potentially perverse effects of government participation of extremist parties and advocating both procedural and substantive principles of democracy (see Rummens & Abts, 2010).
Rummens, S., Abts, K. (2010). Defending democracy: the concentric containment of political extremism. Political Studies, 58(4): 649-665.
