Partido Rex

Partido Rex was a newly founded, ultranationalist and pro-Nazi Walloon party whose early electoral success helped make a Hitler-led European order seem politically ascendant. In May 1936 it won twenty-one seats in Belgium’s general election, outpolling its Flemish counterpart and reinforcing the hopes of Jan Schmitt de Wandaleer, who was looking for a political home in Europe.

Formation and electoral breakthrough

In May 1936, the Flemish nationalist party Unión Nacional Flamenca won sixteen seats, while Partido Rex, described as the Walloon and still more powerful branch of the same movement, won twenty-one. The results were striking for two parties that had only recently been founded. They suggested to their supporters not merely a momentary foothold but the prospect of further political victories.

Connection to Jan Schmitt de Wandaleer

Jan had arrived in Europe from Buenos Aires in 1936 and was searching for a place in which he could belong. The election results offered him the sign he had been waiting for: he soon regarded Antwerp as a suitable base from which to fight for a Europe united under the Führer, abandoning his earlier idea of moving to Hamburg. Partido Rex matters in this trajectory as the stronger electoral expression of the wider movement that gave Jan’s political hopes an immediate, tangible setting.

Significance

The party’s twenty-one seats placed it ahead of its Flemish counterpart in the same election and lent credibility to the movement’s promise of future influence. The novel uses that success to show how electoral gains could draw an individual’s longing for belonging into a transnational fascist project. Partido Rex is presented not in isolation but as part of a broader political current that offered Jan a vision of European unity under Nazi leadership.