“In 1869 Karl Marx called Belgium ‘the snug, well-hedged, little paradise of the landlord, the capitalist, and the priest.’ In 2021 Belgium offers the EU’s best hope for the ideology that bears his name.” So claimed the Economist last month, as the free-marketeer weekly identified the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB) as one of the most dynamic actors of the European left. While in its first forty years of existence the PTB was a small Marxist-Leninist party whose membership numbered in the hundreds, over the last decade it experienced rapid growth, becoming a real force in national politics. Today it is polling third place nationally (expected to win eighteen seats in the next general election) and boasting twenty-four thousand members in a country with a population smaller than Ohio’s.

Much of the change owes to the events of 2008 — the year of the economic crisis, but also a time of important reorientation of the PTB itself. That year’s Renewal Congress, which saw Peter Mertens become party president, declared the need to reject past sectarianism and bring the party’s activity into closer contact with the needs of working-class Belgians. The effects were soon visible in the rapid growth of the PTB, including the election of its first MPs and the expansion of party-led initiatives like Medicine for the People, whose 250 staff provide primary health care at a dozen local action centers.

Raoul Hedebouw has been one of the PTB’s rising stars in this period. One of the first two PTB MPs elected in 2014, he soon became famous for his robust questioning of establishment politicians and direct assertion of working-class interests — and after 2019’s general election, he returned to parliament at the head of a now twelve-strong PTB cohort. With Mertens announcing last month that he will step down as party president, last Sunday the PTB’s Congrès de l’Unité elected Hedebouw to succeed him.