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Van Rompuy vs Democracy
11/24/2009 :: Herman Van Rompuy, a Belgian Christian-Democrat, was appointed President of Europe in a secret meeting of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. The peoples of Europe had no say whatsoever in deciding who their first President was going to be. In the June 2007 Belgian general elections, the last elections he participated in, Herman Van Rompuy got 31,403 votes in an electoral district of 850,248 voters (voting is compulsory in Belgium). This means that only 0.23% out of 375 million EU voters got a chance to vote for him and only 0,008% did so.
It is indicative of Van Rompuy’s character that, following the elections, he immediately betrayed his own voters. Van Rompuy’s electoral district is the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) district. BHV encompasses both Belgium’s bilingual (French and Dutch) capital Brussels and the surrounding Dutch-speaking Halle-Vilvoorde region. In 2003, Belgium’s Constitutional Court ruled that the BHV district was unconstitutional and that Parliament should remedy the situation by dividing it into two electoral districts, a bilingual electoral district Brussels and a Dutch-language electoral district Halle-Vilvoorde. This complaint had been lodged by Herman Van Rompuy, a Flemish inhabitant of Halle-Vilvoorde.
Tricks
In 2003, however, the Christian-Democrats were in opposition. Van Rompuy’s complaint was designed to cause political problems for Belgium’s Liberal government, because the French-speaking parties in the government refused to accept the verdict of the Constitutional Court. The Flemish Christian-Democrats went to the June 2007 general elections with as their major theme the promise that, once in government, they would split BHV. Van Rompuy campaigned on the issue, his party won the elections and became Flanders’ largest party.
After the elections, however, Van Rompuy became the Speaker of the Parliament. In this position he refused to split the district because the French-speaking politicians objected. To prevent Parliament, and the Flemish representatives there, from voting a bill to split BHV, Van Rompuy used all kinds of tricks. One day he even had the locks of the plenary meeting room changed so that Parliament could not convene to vote on the issue. On another occasion, he did not show up in his office for a whole week to avoid opening a letter demanding him to table the matter.
Cynicism
His tactics worked. In December 2008, Van Rompuy succeeded the previous Belgian Prime Minister, Yves Leterme, who had to resign in the wake of a financial scandal. During the following 11 months, he skillfully managed to postpone any parliamentary vote on the BHV matter, thereby prolonging a situation which the Supreme Court, responding to his own complaint in 2003, has ruled to be unconstitutional.
This man has now become President of Europe, a position where his cynicism and his skills to circumvent the democratic will of the people will come in handy.
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