Right-wing populism, crumbling migrants’ rights and strategies of resistance in Belgium

This chapter adopts a two-stage analysis of legal resilience against far-reaching restrictions of migrants’ rights. It first investigates the resilience of the Belgian constitutional system against potential hostile take-over by right-wing populists. It is concluded that the constitutional framework provides relatively robust protection against democratic decay, as a result of which the separation of powers remains intact. At the same time, most constitutional safeguards that prevent a hypothetical slide towards authoritarianism in Belgium only provide weak constraints against the very real an... Mehr ...