Belgian federalism is all about identity/community divide: media system, party system, government formation, etc. This has caused many political gridlocks over the past years, and even decades. The identity cleavage appears to remain at the top of the agenda with the success of the N-VA. Yet, something has changed with the new leader: its discourses changed: they are nationalist not with flag, but with calculator (expliquer: prendre metaphor du Junkie). This change is also part of the re-born of N-VA (see Beyens, Stefanie, Kris Deschouwer, Emilie van Haute, and Tom Verthé. 2015) This explains the importance of discourse in the way to describe Belgian federalism. Indeed, federalism is always a matter of representations and representations are determined by discourse (Burgess 2005). This aspect remains rather understudied despite its importance as illustrated in the example of N-VA. The objective of this paper is precisely to tackle this issue through one aspect, namely the impact of metaphors on citizens’ representations and preferences vis-à -vis regional autonomy. Although this aspect a lesser-known branch for political scientists, the central role of metaphors on our understanding of abstract domains of experience has become a key issue in cognitive science since the development of Lakoff & Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980, xxx). According to this theory, metaphors should not be regarded as mere conceptual devices in terms of which we perceive our environment. conceptual tools