Electoral constituencies in Belgium: find yours

An electoral constituency (circonscription électorale) is the territory where the votes of an election are counted and a fixed number of seats is allocated. For the Chamber, Belgium has eleven: the ten provinces, plus Brussels-Capital. But each assembly draws its own, so your municipality sits in several constituencies at once.

What is an electoral constituency in Belgium?

It is the area in which seats are calculated independently. The D'Hondt method, described in the article on how seats are allocated, is never applied to the whole country: each constituency has its own lists, its own vote total and its own number of seats. A voter therefore chooses only among the lists of theirs.

The Chamber's information sheet is clear on two points: the law sets the constituencies, and the number of seats in each is proportional to its population.

How do you find your constituency in four steps?

The simplest way is to start from your municipality and work upwards, assembly by assembly.

1. For the Chamber, find the province of your municipality. It is your constituency, unless you live in one of the nineteen Brussels municipalities, which together form the Brussels-Capital constituency.
2. For the Walloon Parliament, if you live in Wallonia, look up the district (arrondissement): Walloon constituencies follow districts or groups of districts, such as Liège, Verviers or Huy-Waremme.
3. For the Flemish Parliament, it is the province in Flanders, giving five constituencies. The 6 Flemish members for the Brussels Region are, for their part, elected in Brussels.
4. If in doubt, your municipality's elections or population office will confirm the answer in a single call.

One resident of Dinant, two constituencies

Take a real case. Dinant is in the province of Namur, so a resident of Dinant votes for the Chamber in the Namur constituency, which elects 7 members.

For the Walloon Parliament, the same person votes in the Dinant-Philippeville constituency, which elects only 4. The daily DH summed it up before the 2024 election: the province of Namur was sending 11 members to the Walloon Parliament, 7 for the Namur district and 4 for the Dinant-Philippeville district.

Same municipality, same voters, two different maps.

The Parliament of the German-speaking Community has a single constituency, Eupen-Saint-Vith, according to the FPS Interior.

Who sets the number of seats in each constituency, and does it change?

The law draws the constituencies. The number of seats follows demographics. For the Chamber, BX1 reminded readers in 2024 that this distribution is reassessed every ten years, and that Brussels went from 15 to 16 seats and Namur from 6 to 7, while Liège went from 15 to 14 and Hainaut from 18 to 17. The total stays at 150.

A seat therefore weighs a certain number of inhabitants. In Namur, the population was 503,582 on 1 January 2024, according to DH. Divided by 7 seats, that gives about 71,940 inhabitants per seat (503,582 / 7 = 71,940.3). The calculation is redone here from a single figure quoted in the press: it gives an order of magnitude, not the official value of the divisor.

On the Walloon side, it is the Region's government that revises the distribution every ten years, according to L'Avenir. In 2014, Namur gained a member compared with 2009 and Mons lost one.

Eleven Walloon constituencies, from 4 to 13 seats

The number of seats also sets the bar to clear. In a constituency of n seats, a list is certain to win a seat as soon as it exceeds 100 divided by (n + 1) per cent of the votes. Here is that calculation for the eleven constituencies of the Walloon Parliament, based on the distribution published in the Chamber's information sheet on regional parliaments.

The total does come to 75. The legal threshold of 5% applies in each regional constituency, but it plays no role here: the arithmetic is stricter than the law everywhere. For the Chamber, the same calculation is set out in the article on the D'Hondt method.

The Walloon distribution cited here comes from a parliamentary information sheet that carries no date: the total and the cases of Namur (7) and Dinant-Philippeville (4) are cross-checked against the press, and the other values should be confirmed in the FPS Interior's official records.

Four common confusions

• People assume the Chamber's 150 seats are distributed nationally. They are distributed province by province, with a separate division in each of the eleven constituencies.
• People confuse their municipality with their constituency. The first is the administrative level, the second is the territory of the calculation: Dinant is a municipality, while the province of Namur and the Dinant-Philippeville district are two different constituencies depending on the assembly.
• People suppose every election counts the same seats everywhere. A Walloon voter in Mons elects 5 Walloon members, while a voter in Liège elects 13, because the law follows population.
• People think the map is fixed. The number of seats is recalculated every ten years, and some constituencies gain or lose a seat without their boundaries moving.

Do constituencies change from one election to the next?

Their boundaries, rarely. Their weight, more regularly: it is the ten-year revision that moves a seat from one province to another, as in 2024 between Hainaut, Liège, Brussels and Namur.

To see where parties stand on reforming institutions, without ranking them, the ranking and the comparison tool detail each theme, and the methodology points out that the published scores reflect a position on an axis, never a quality. The article on Regions and Communities explains which assembly decides what.

Sources: Chamber of Representatives, information sheet on electoral constituencies and information sheet on regional parliaments; FPS Interior, guide to entities, elections and constituencies for 9 June 2024; Wallonie.be, election and composition of the Parliament of Wallonia; IBSA, 2024 elections in Brussels, methodology; BX1, seat distribution for 2024; DH, province of Namur, 9 June 2024 election, 27 May 2024; L'Avenir, the Walloon members, 21 May 2014. The calculations in this article are redone from these sources.