Flemish political parties operate in the whole Flemish Community, which covers the unilingual Flemish Region and the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. In the latter, they compete with French-speaking parties that all also operate in Wallonia. There are very few parties that operate on a national level in Belgium. Flanders generally tends to vote for right-wing, conservative parties, whereas in French-speaking Belgium the socialist party is usually the most successful one. Flanders has a diverse multi-party system of politics. Many parties are active, and often none succeeds in obtaining more than one third of the votes, let alone a majority. Therefore, parties must work with each other to form coalition governments. Most current Flemish parties grew from the main political parties that for long dominated Belgian politics: the Catholic Party (Church-oriented and conservative), the Liberal Party (anti-clerical and progressive) and the Socialist Party. These three groups still dominate Flemish politics, but they have evolved substantially in character. In the 21st century however, conservative nationalist parties such as Vlaams Blok/Belang and especially the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) which became the largest party in 2010, were successful and broke the domination of the traditional catholic, liberal and socialist parties. Catholics/Christian Democrats The Christian-democratic party has its origins in the 19th century. in that period, it mainly competed with the liberals. They for long took turns in leading Belgian government. By the end of the 19th century, the then emerging socialist party rapidly took an important place in Belgian politics. This continued in the first half of the 20th century. In the 1930s, the Christian-democrats started feeling competition from Flemish nationalists. After World War II, the Catholic (now Christian Democratic) Party severed its formal ties with the Church. It became a mass party of the center, somewhat like a big tent political party in the United States. In 1978, the Christian Democratic Party, responding to linguistic tensions in the country, divided into two independent parties: the Parti Social Chrétien (PSC) in French-speaking Belgium and the Christelijke Volkspartij (CVP) in Flanders. The two parties pursue the same basic policies but maintain separate organizations. The CVP was the larger of the two, getting more than twice as many votes as the PSC. Following the 1999 federal elections, the CVP and PSC were ousted from office, bringing an end to a 40-year term on the government benches. In 2001, the CVP changed its name to CD&V (Christen-Democratisch en