Shrinking Public Spaces and Party Militancy in the Labour Party of Belgium

Democracies today are widely described as being in crisis, as multiple and intersecting dynamics – environmental breakdown, socio-economic precarity, geopolitical tensions, the rise of the far right, and growing authoritarian tendencies– combine into what can been conceptualized as a polycrisis of democracy (Heidemann, 2023). Within this context, political parties – and most notably left-wing parties – are frequently portrayed as emblematic of this democratic backsliding. Once considered key gatekeepers of participation and representation, they are now depicted as weakened organizations marked by shrinking memberships, declining activist engagement, low levels of public trust, and increasing electoral abstention.
Belgium offers an instructive case to examine these dynamics. Like many Western European democracies, it exhibits several markers of democratic crisis, including the rise of the far right, restrictions on protest, growing pressure on trade unions, and challenges to press freedom. Combined with the complexity of the Belgian federal system, these trends fuel institutional distrust, which is often interpreted as evidence of political parties’ inability to respond effectively to contemporary crises.
However, despite these symptoms of “democratic fatigue” (Van Reybrouck, 2013), political parties in Western Europe continue to play a central role in structuring political competition. They remain key actors in candidate selection, programmatic elaboration, and parliamentary life. Belgium, for example, is frequently referred to as a “particracy”. This persistence raises a crucial question: can we meaningfully speak of a “crisis” or even an “end” of political parties?
While a substantial body of literature has long diagnosed party decline and depoliticization throughout the twentieth century, more recent work has begun to challenge these declinist interpretations. Rather than interpreting contemporary developments as signs of disappearance, these studies highlight processes of organizational transformation, reconfiguration and hybridization of party forms and modes of engagement. From this perspective, the contemporary period appears less as a collapse of parties than as a redefinition of their roles, practices and relationships with activism and social mobilization.
This presentation situates itself within this literature and seeks to reassess declinist or “collapsological” approaches to political parties (Dézé, 2025). It is structured in two parts. The first offers a critical review of the literature on the crisis of political parties and partisan activism. The second focuses on an in-depth case study of the Labour Party of Belgium (PTB) “from below”. Long marginalized and rooted in a Maoist tradition, this Marxist-Leninist, anti- capitalist party has grown steadily since the late 2000s, both electorally and in terms of membership.
This atypical trajectory challenges several widely held assumptions: the alleged divorce between the left and the working classes, the inevitability of a rightward shift in society, and the irreversible decline of party activism. The PTB suggests that parties can still mobilize by offering an alternative political narrative, by sustaining intense political socialization, and by providing durable spaces for collective engagement.