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Belgium Is Not a Model
05/01/2008 ::
On 20 March, more than nine months after the Belgian general elections, which were held on June 10, 2007, Yves Leterme, the Flemish Christian-Democrat leader, finally managed to form a centre-left government coalition of Christian-Democrats, Liberals and Walloon Socialists.
Belgium is a country composed of 62% Dutch-speaking Flemings in Flanders, the northern part of the country, and 38% French-speaking Walloons in Wallonia, the southern part. The Flemings are largely conservative and free-market oriented; the Walloons are predominantly socialist because they are at the receiving end of the Belgian state’s welfare subsidies and want to keep it that way.
No programme
After more than six months without a government and three months with an “interim government” led by Guy Verhofstadt, the man who lost the June 10 elections but had been asked by King Albert II to return and help defuse the political crisis, Mr Leterme was able to form a coalition without a government programme.
The Belgian media do not expect the government to last long. The Flemish parties want a looser federation. The Walloon parties veto this. The Belgian Constitution requires that a majority is needed in each of the regions to change the Constitution.
Rotten institutions
The Economist points out (March 27) that Belgium’s institutions are “rotten” because the necessity to find political compromises “proved fatal to democratic accountability. […] If the new government does not surrender more powers to the regions by July, Flemish separatists in the coalition could walk out, triggering a new crisis that edges Belgium a step closer to partition.”
The Vlaams Belang favours the dissolution of Belgium and the establishment of two independent states: Flanders and Wallonia. The Economist, too, “see[s] Belgium’s new government not as a relief, but as an awful warning. A political union hatched together by a fractious elite, and answerable only to itself, is not a model for anybody to follow.” During the past nine months more and more Flemings have come to share our (and The Economist’s) view that Belgium should be dissolved. Sadly, Mr Leterme apparently chose to become the last Prime Minister of Belgium rather than the first President of an independent Flanders.
Article in issue nº 22
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