As a pupil and a student, Tom Van Grieken was respectively active in the NJSV and the NSV, eventually becoming National President of the NSV. Van Grieken became a member of Vlaams Blok in 2003 as a teenager and subsequently joined its successor Vlaams Belang. After his studies, Van Grieken was elected elected national president of the Vlaams Belang Jongeren, the youth wing of Vlaams Belang. In September 2014, he was nominated by the party's council to become the party's new leader. At the party's congress in October he ran unopposed and obtained 93% of the votes, becoming Belgium's youngest party leader ever. Although initially known as a hardliner within the party, he has since attempted to moderate the VB's image as leader in order to break the cordon sanitaire imposed on the party, stating "There is no cordon sanitaire around our ideas, but there is about our style." He has been a member of the Municipality Council of Mortsel from 2007 until 2018 and was elected in the Flemish Parliament in 2014. He was elected as a member of the Municipality Council in the town of Schoten, where he now still lives, in 2018. Under his leadership the VB has seen a massive increase in public support, including finishing in second place in the Flemish region during the 2019 federal elections in which Van Grieken was elected to the Chamber of Representatives. Following the election, he became the first leader of the VB to attend a meeting with King Philippe along with the other main party leaders. In November 2019, he was reelected as party leader and obtained 97,4% of the votes. The Vlaams Belang party continues to flourish under his leadership. In a poll published in December 2019, Vlaams Belang polled at 27,3 percent, making it the biggest party in Flanders and Belgium as a whole.
Van Grieken calls himself a Flemish patriot. He frequently states that patriotism is love and he compares the love for ones country to the love that a mother has for her child: "Patriotism is love. A mother loves her child and wants to protect it above all other children. That doesn't mean she hates the other children. A state is the same. It has a duty to first take care of its own citizens. You can only spend every Euro once. Only if the needs of our own citizens are taken care of, we can consider helping others."
Van Grieken was the only party leader in Belgium to support president Donald Trump. He saw the election of Donald Trump as the start of "a patriotic wave that will roll over Europe". He publicly defended Trump multiple times and on many occasions accused the Flemish and European media of being biased towards the United States president.
Publications
On 3 May 2017 Tom Van Grieken published his first book titled Toekomst in eigen handen. It was the first time in the history of the party that a book by a leading member was also for sale in regular bookshops. Even before publication, the book already caused a stir, due to the fact that the well-respected and internationally acclaimed professor international politicsJonathan Holslag wrote the foreword. The general reception of the book was also a step in a new direction for the Vlaams Belang. The famous Flemish journalist Walter Pauli wrote in the weekly news magazineKnack: "In their heyday, members of the Vlaams Belang party could only have dreamed of receiving the same reception as the new book by Vlaams Belang-chairman Tom Van Grieken." Het Laatste Nieuws, the biggest Flemish newspaper, read "surprising ideas" in it. Another newspaper, De Standaard, remarked: "The program remains radical, yet Van Grieken's use of language never goes out of line."
