- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday October 10 2000 02.27 BST
In a pattern which is being repeated across the continent, the party defied pollsters who had predicted its demise. Its share of the vote in Antwerp rose to 33%, from 28% in 1994, the last time that local elections were held in Belgium.
The Blok's success is part of an alarming trend which has seen Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom party make dramatic electoral gains in Austria, and it mirrors that of Scandinavian anti-foreigner parties which have also recently seen their popularity on the rise.
The Blok is often compared to Italy's increasingly popular Northern League, since it would like to see Dutch-speaking Flanders, in the north, break away from Belgium's French-speaking south to become an independent state.
The upset in Antwerp hands the Blok 20 of the city council's 55 seats, a level of support that was far from isolated. The party enjoyed electoral success right across the north of the country - the only region it contests - and it consistently clinched more than a fifth of votes in Flemish towns and cities.
The voting took place on Sunday, but the margin of victory became clear only yesterday, and the hand-wringing began.
Commentators compared the Blok's success to the peste brune, or brown plague, the phrase used to describe the Nazi occupation of Belgium during the second world war.
The front page of the influential daily Le Soir was adorned with an apocalyptic image of Antwerp being circled by scary-looking ravens, while the front page of its rival, De Morgen, was turned into a tombstone listing the various cities that had fallen to the Blok.
"One in three Antwerp citizens believes in fear, intolerance, unadulterated racism and law and order," the paper lamented.
The results are a severe embarrassment to the country's ruling centre-right coalition, which has been one of Europe's fiercest critics of Aus tria's Freedom party. The prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, did his best to play down the upset, but admitted that the result was "a stain".
"All the democratic parties have pledged not to form alliances with the Vlaams Blok. Due to the attitude of other parties, it is doomed to disappear in the long run," he predicted.
But the Blok's charismatic leader, Filip Dewinter, has threatened to disrupt local government business if his party is not allowed to govern in Antwerp. "This is a major victory for the Vlaams Blok. I did not expect this, such a major breakthrough," he crowed.
However, the signs are that the other political parties will bury their differences and form a coalition rather than hand power to Mr Dewinter. They have erected a cordon sanitaire , or exclusion zone, around the Blok since 1994.
Although one-third of Antwerp's voters cast their ballots for the Blok, it was hard to find public support for it on the streets last night. "In the suburbs there are problems with the Moroccans and the Turks, and the people who live there believe the only solution is to vote for the Blok," a student, Jeroen Barbe, said.
The Blok's "solution" to this is brutally simple - it wants to send all non-European foreigners back to their countries of origin.
