19th November 2013

Christian Democrats in Belgium and elsewhere are sometimes accused of not having a clear ideology, a “big picture” of their own. Decades of participating in coalition governments are said to have alienated them from their ideological principles and made them into “power politicians” or pragmatic “plumbers”. The singularity of the Christian Democrat identity in a historical perspective was the theme of an international workshop, held on 14 and 15 November in Leuven. Among other things, participants were seeking an answer to the question of what common elements we find after 1945 in the ideology of people who identified themselves as Christian Democrats and sought to join up with an international Christian Democrat organization.