2023-10-13 09:53:17
The more attached a person is to their Walloon identity, the more positive their attitude towards migrants, the Institute for Social and Political Opinion (ISPO) at KU Leuven University reported in a study on Friday. On the Flemish side, it’s the opposite. The more a person identifies with Flanders, the less tolerant they are towards migration.
In 2003, researchers demonstrated that the more a person identified with Flanders or Wallonia, the more negative their attitude was towards migrants. The new study from KU Leuven therefore aimed to determine whether these trends were still current by observing a period of almost 30 years, extending from 1991 to 2020.
After each federal parliamentary election, between 600 and 1,000 people were interviewed in Wallonia. In Flanders, between 1,000 and 1,700. It appears from this new study that the attitudes of Belgians towards migration remained relatively stable during this period, except between 2010 and 2014. During these four years, the researchers noted a significant increase in points positive views towards migrants.
This positive trend goes once morest what we expected.
“This positive trend goes once morest what we expected,” the researchers say. “There is a permanent climate of economic crisis, strong calls from right-wing political parties for more restrictive social reforms and a predominantly negative discourse towards migrants and refugees. But according to 2020 data, this positive trend is not continuing. We suspect that politicized events have broken it, such as terrorist attacks, among others.”
Furthermore, the study shows that the more a person identifies with Wallonia, the more tolerant they are towards migration, and vice versa for Flanders. The 2003 results are therefore partially confirmed.
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