Antwerp has a great deal to offer visitors. There’s the fashion museum, for the connoisseur of all things couture. The diamond trade and a colossal container port mean the city is extremely prosperous. But things are far from tranquil in the city of diamonds.

In Belgium's local elections in October 2012, Antwerp's voters picked a non-socialist mayor for the first time since World War II. They broke with tradition to elect Bart De Wever, leader of the Flemish separatist New Flemish Alliance, known as the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie in Dutch, which wants to split the country's richer, northern, Dutch-speaking region off from French-speaking Wallonia. Brussels, the third federal state in Belgium, is like the child of parents on the brink of a divorce, and would be hotly contested if the country does go further down the path of separatism. Mayors wield a great deal of power in the country's Byzantine political system.