Talk Elections

I thought I'd take my responsibility and create this thread about everything related to the current Belgian political crisis as well as random stuff I feel like writing about.

So where are things at in the formation of the Belgian government?
Right now negotiations are underway between 7 different parties: 4 Flemish parties and 3 Walloon/Francophone parties. The parties are the following:

-N-VA: or New-Flemish Alliance, the famed party of Bart De Wever and probably the greatest obstacle to a quick formation. The N-VA has its roots in the old Nationalist VU (People's Union) which was actually a pretty good party and which was rather on the left on social issues for most of its existence. The N-VA has evolved from the so-called 'Oranjehofgroep' within the VU, which were the hardliners that even back then weren't too keen on any dealmaking. Between 2003 and 2008 the N-VA was in a cartel with the Christian-Democratic CD&V, after they failed, with the exception of a seat in West Flanders, home province of their leader at the time, Geert Bourgeois, to get into parliament on their own in 2003. Right now they represent 27.8% of Flemish voters in the Chamber of Deputies and is, of course, a hard-line nationalist and separatist party which is also both fiscally and socially conservative.

-CD&V or 'Christian-Democratic & Flemish' (yeah, they don't have a substantive in their name) is the old Christian-Democratic Party CVP (Christian People's Party), which dominated Belgian political landscape for most of the 20th century. When Guy Verhofstadt, took power in 1999, he ended a period of 41 years of Christian-Democratic Prime Ministers, with only one interruption of 3-4 months back in the '80s. Shellshocked after being thrown out of government the CVP underwent a metamorphosis to become the much more Flemish CD&V at the infamous Vilvoorde Congress. It was CD&V leader Yves Leterme who precede over the disastrous 2007-2008 formation and failed to get the issues we are faced by now solved. The CD|V represents a meagre 17.3% of Flemish voters and combines a Flemish Confederalist doscourse with being absolutely scared out of its wit by the N-VA which has consumed most of its electoral base. Current PM Leterme is probably at the end of his career and will probably be replaced by current Flemish Minister-President Kris Peeters, which would mark a shift to  the right. Both gentlemen felt too good to actually get involved in the last election or to, you know, get elected to be the leader of their own party and were at those occasions replaced by MEP Marianne Thyssen and current party president Wouter Beke.

-SP.a or 'Socialist Party - different' (yeah, I know, it's a funny name) is the Flemish Social-Democratic Party, which has been declining ever since the eighties and the mythical European Elections of 1984 when the late Karel van Miert led them to become for the first and the last time the largest political party in Flanders, lived trough a small rennaissance under Steve Stevaert and his 'cozy socialism', but failed to overtake the Liberals in 2003. Having been a junior Coalition partner in the now reviled 1999-2007 period , the party was utterly torn appart in 2007 and only managed the status quo in 2009 and 2010. The party has the vicorious Walloon PS to thank for its place at the negotiations table and is probably together with the ecologists the party which wants a deal more than the other Flemish Parties, though recently some of the more Third Way elements within it have been touting a technocratic edition of confederalism as a potential model for the future. The SP.A, which is led by Caroline Gennez, represents 14.6% of voters and has a centre-left outlook on social and fiscal issues.

-Groen!: Yes, the exclamation mark is part of their name, is the Flemish ecologist party. It is traditionally less strong than its big brother in Wallonia for reasons I might elaborate on later, but has been gaining support steadily over the last couple of years. After getting a taste from what Governing is all about and an eclatant 1999 victory at the polls they were crushed and thrown out of parliament in 2003. They seem to be the party of choice for people who don't like the N-VA, but still are at the table to negotiate as the ecologist movement is needed to assure a 2/3rds majority for any major Institutional Reform that would be decided upon. They represent 6.9% of the voters, are the least Flemish of all Flemish parties and, as a consequence, have consistently proven to be most immune of all parties to the N-VA tsunami of 2010, making them one of the stronger positioned negotiators. Their leader is complete newbie Wouter van Besien, who's doing an okay job.

I'll do Wallonia and the political opposition in the making tomorrow or the day after. I am also looking forward to any questions you people may have.

In the mean time: here is the pseudo-offical site with election results 1848-2007 and links to the 2009 regionals results:

http://www.ibzdgip.fgov.be/result/fr/main.html

That site is made of win. It would be nice if France stopped being a third-world country and put a full compilation of elections since 1848 online.

I am ashamed to admit that my knowledge of Belgium pretty much ends at chocolate, waffles, and french fries.

Still, those are three things to be proud of! :P

So, the Wallonian parties who are supposed to be in the next government:

-PS, or Parti Socialiste is the traditionally dominant party of Wallonian politics. While it used to be horribly corrupt, it has underwent a clean-up operation in recent years under the leasership of Elio Di Rupo, a son of Italian immigrants and openly homosexual. The party received some electoral beatings troughout the last decades, untill it became Wallonia's 2nd party in 2007 after the victorious MR. In 2010 the party ressurected from its ashes and won a good 37.6% of the vote and is likely to see Di Rupo become PM, should a government be formed in the forseeable future. The party used to be more anti-Flemish nationalism than the average Wallonian party, but seems to have passed that title on to the CDh and (mainly) MR-FDF.

-cdH or Democratic Humanist Centre has evolved from the old Christian-Democratic PSC minus several right-wing break-away factions (most notably the MCC, which now is one of the three core groups in the MR). The party as a result is probably one of the more left-wing European Christian-Democratic parties. Its leader, Joelle Milquet, became famous during the 2007 formation/fiasco as 'Madame Non', as the N-VA and the CD&V privately blamed her for the utter failure of the negotiations. The party disappointed at the polls in 2007 and lost some ground in 2010, but as they managed to enter the regional anti-MR coalition in Wallonia in 2009, they were also invited to have a seat at the table this time round despite winning only some 14.6% of the Wallonian vote.

-Ecolo: the francophone Greens, who did tremendously well in 1999, were ravaged in 2003 and have been recovering ever since. The party  form a very thight alliance with Groen!, which makes the ecologists  possibly vital players. They have some  very charismatic politicians (Jean-Marc Nollet, Jean-Michel Javaux) and are seemingly always on the verge of a huge break, only to fade into the background when the campaign begins. They did so in 2007  they did so in 2010, and they did so (to a lesser extent,) in the 2009 regionals. They have some 12.3% of the Wallonian vote behind them.

Well, the results prior to 1894 or so are very fragmentary.

While I'm too lazy to expand on the other parties right now, I might give you all an update on the ongoing crisis. On the 5th of January royal intermediator Johan Vandelanotte (SP.a) presented a possible agreement which could form the basis for a last round of negotiations and which he had been working on since November. While his own party, the greens and the francophone parties were quick to praise the text and give it a 'yes', the N-VA and the CD&V (surprise! surprise!) thought it to be an unsatisfactory start for negotiations and gave it a 'no'. Following that a triumvirate consisting from Vandelanotte, Di Rupo and De Wever to try and work things out, spent the last two weeks negotiating with one another and with several other party leaders. Today that ended as well as Vandelanotte resigned. The consensus now seems to be there won't be a government with these 7 parties. There are several other options:

-A government with the 2 largest factions of each half of the country: PS, MR, N-VA, CD&V
+
The N-VA has been trying to get the MR in on the negotiations since September
There won't be any issues concerning the legitimacy of the parties involved as major players
-
Why would the PS want to negotizate with three rightwing parties?
No 2/3rds majority
The MR would bring the radical FDF to the table
PS hates MR

-Just add the liberals to the mix: PS, MR, ecolo, cdH, SP.a, Groen!, CD&V, N-VA, OpenVLD
+
Nobody has anything to lose when everybody ese is on board as well
The Flemish right gets a more rightwing government
-
A nine party government isn't very workable
the FDF thing
PS hates MR

-A government with the liberals, but without N-VA: PS, ecolo, MR, cdH, SP.a, CD&V, Groen!, OpenVLD (so basically a classical tripartite)
+
No obstructionism from the N-VA
Everybody would be supermotivated to not screw up and give the next election to the N-VA
-
The N-VA would kill everybody at the next election
The N-VA is the largest party. What happened to democracy?
PS hates MR
CD&V would rather swallow its own feces than risk to lose any voters to the N-VA and isn't much less obstructionist anyway

-Another Purple-Green government: PS, MR, ecolo, SP.a, Groen!, OpenVLD
+
No major nationalists at the table
I could see these parties take the time to spend more than a couple of minutes on working out an economic plan
-
See all of the above
No 2/3rd majority
Ridiculously few Flemish MP's
Just so you know: PS hates MR

-New elections
+
What else could be done?
Just let the voter fix it
-
Would just have the same parties winning with even more votes to go by recent polls
Political credibility dies completely
Whoever triggers this is going to get the 'joker' for more than 8 months of messing up

For the record: I only can see the purple-green cabinet function more or less normally and have them as my preferred option. In all honesty I'd predict that they'll try the first option and then have some early elections in May/June which won't solve anything.

If the last round of negociations fail will there be new elections? In that case what parties are likly to benefit from that?

A new election is a definite possibility right now, though it would probably just result in another big victory for the N-VA and another big vctory for the PS.

As expected the Liberals are being launched into the negotiations today.

http://www.lesoir.be/actualite/belgique/elections_2010/2011-01-27/les-liberaux-en-piste-des-demain-817922.php

Di Rupo now calling fo a government of national unity, which probably means that the MR and OpenVLD now are definately in.

Minor Newsflash: The MR today elected a new leader. Charles Michel managed to gather some 55% of the votes. He's the son of former Foreign Affairs minister and MR leader Louis Michel. This is unlikely to be really important but it could indicate that the FDF will have less importance at the top of the MR as Reynders used the FDF as a part of his anti-Michel coalition.

As we're approaching the world record for screwing up when it comes to forming a government:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnqkPjoqrUY&feature=player_embedded#

Don't know whether anyone actually reads this but I thought I'd better give you guys another update.

Ex-MR leader and incumbent Finance minister Didier Reynders today was appointed to try to find a consensus among all parties and propose a possible formula for the next government. This is not what I expected but it is in line with the liberals slowly but steadily increasing involvement in the negotiations.

Winners:
MR
Bart de Wever

Losers:
Di Rupo and the PS

I'm reading with interest. I think people tend not to comment much on these threads because they know too little to contribute. At least that's how I feel.

They should announce the new government on April 1. It will just beat the all-time world record of a lack of government, and the announcement will be welcomed with a laugh.

A new election is no solution if the Flemish and Walloon political parties are not willing to cooperate.

The record will fall on the 14th of this month if I'm not mistaken. Festivities are being planned already (just have a look at the youtube link above, which celebrates the approaching 'World Championship' and tells us : 'our politicians are heroes').


The real problem isn't that there is absolutely no willingness to collaborate but that the wrong people have a seat at the table and that there's no way a new election would result in these people no longer being at the table. (To be explicit: The N-VA, The CD&V and probably the FDF)

Some random bits of political news:
-Last week the Vlaams Belang honoured a long tradition and tried to put amnesty for the  'collobarateurs' of WW II on the schedule of the Chamber. As usual it was voted down by the Francophone parties and the Flemish left, though only by 4 votes. Unsurprisingly the entire N-VA delegation voted for the proposal, which is especially notable given some noises made by people ranking high in the Flemish Movement asking the N-VA to make this one of their demands at the negotiations.
-High-profile former journalist and N-VA MP Siegfried Bracke is being haunted by his former membership of the SP(.a) from 1987-2001 and several columns he pseudonymously wrote for the party magazine during that period. He had some interesting things to say about Flemish-Nationalism, which he deemed to be 'past its prime and no longer relevant' and about the war mentality 'many nationalists seem to have'.
- Defence minister Pieter de Crem (CD&V) is criticized by just about everyone after documents from the American Embassy in Brussels which were among Wikileaks latest batch, revealed that he had briefed the US State Department and Clinton personally on the inner conflicts of the government and on how the government could best be pressurized into concessions and an expansion of the Belgian involvement in Afghanistan

That part interests me. I've read before about how Belgian (Flemish) nationalists are apparently not just Nazi but explicitly pro-Hitler in many instances. That always struck me as pretty odd. Most nationalist movements tend to be, well, nationalist. I don't think parties like the BNP would hail traitors of the nation just because they did for a racist foreign government.

Is there a particular explanation for why this is the case in Belgium? Is it that the Germans were seen as allies against French influence?

A very good question. It has mainly to do with the fact that the Germans indeed were seen by many Nationalists at the time as saviours who would unite Flanders with its Germanic brethren. When the Germans occupied Flanders during WW I they instituted some degree of self-government and made the State University of Ghent unilingual. During WW II the Flemish Nationalist movement collaborated to a level not matched elsewhere in Western Europe.

I think there are 2 factors which make Flemish-Nationalists (and members of the Walloon FN as well) less eager to distantiate themselves from this past. Firstly the degree of Fascism and National-Solidarism's popularity in Belgium even before 1940 (Rex and Degrelle, the VNV, Verdinaso,...), which means much of the collaboration came from within the existing party structures and from already existing groups, many of which were interwoven with the whole of the Flemish Movement and the whole of the Walloon right.

A second big reason for this is the (false) myth of collaboration as an anti-communist act which had nothing to do with the Shoah or with the deportation of young men to Germany. To this day some on the Flemish hard-right seem to think that the 'Flemish Legion' and its Walloon counterpart, fighting the war in the east, was an heroic affair, defending Europe from the Tartarian hordes of the Soviets. This kind of negationist will ignore the oft cited comparison between the ececution of the Endloesung in Denmark and Belgium and will basically deny the involvement of Collaborationist groups with the deportation of the Belgian jews.

I'm not an expert on the period, but this definitely are some of the reasons behind the phenomenon.

To illustrate how the FN is just as rotten as the VB on this :

Headlines of a poll that was supposedly published last saturday:

N-VA: 33% (up 5)
SP.a: 15.6% (up half a percent)
CD&V: 12.9% (down 6 or something like that)
OpenVLD: 12.1% (down 2)

CD&V seems to be in the terminal stages of a decade-spanning decline, which has culminated in the N-VA cannibalizing them. I don't feel any pity.

Notable News:

-Negotiations: Didier Reynders seems desperate to dump the Flemish left and ecolo, and finds a cheerful partner in crime the N-VA. With the ecologists basically kicked out already, the CD&V seems to get to decide whether the SP.a will be dumped.

-Marie-Rose Morel, a former VB-senator and Member of the Flemish Parliament, died of Cancer at age 38 last week. Her illness (and her bizarre love life, which culminated in a marriage with former VB-leader Franck Van Hecke some months ago) had been the subject of a considerable amount of scrutiny in the Flemish media over the past 2 years. She was buried in the Antwerps Cathedral in the presencde of some 2000 people, among whom major names of the Flemish Democratic Right, most notably De Wever. There has been some criticism of the RTBF's report on the event, which focused on Morel's xenophobe ideology. Personally, I didn't like Morel and her style of corporate-nationalism at all.

So has anyone ever thought of the idea of creating a national bilingual party who compete in the entire country? I mean, I understand that the tension between the Wallonians and the Flemish is very strong, but there still seem to be support for a continued united Belgium. Is this a completly radical idea, or could it work?

Also, out of curiosoty, are you Wallonian or Flemish, BelgianSocialist?

   

Well all parties were national untill the 1970's, and the Federal state itself only dates back to 1993. Before 1968 the main parties were the CVP/PSC (christian-democratic), the PS/SP (socialist) and the PVV/PRL (liberal). The CVP/PSC block was the first to explode after Flemish students and teachers in Leuven/Louvain managed to throw out their Francophone counterparts, which led to the creation of the University of Louvain-la-Neuve and to a considerable amout of discontent within the PSC over the way the government had handled the issue. The other parties fell apart during the 70s and early 80s. It should be noted that most of these new, regional parties still have a decent to good relationship with their counterparts on the other side of the Linguistical Frontier. The SP.a was notorious in the early 2000s for doing nothing which Steve [Stevaert] and Elio [Di Rupo] hadn't talked trough beforehand. The big exception to this rule is the CD&V and the cdH, which is mainly because both have completely re-styled themselves since 1972. The CD&V is a fiercely regionalist, conservative party, whereas the cdH has banned Christianity from its name and has made itself into a centre-left party.

The Greens are arguably the only real national party. Ecolo and Groen! caucus as one group in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate and have very, very good relationships. Some of the smaller, non-represented parties are officially national parties: most notably the PVDA+/PTB+, who in my opinion will be in parliament before the decade is over, though I wouldn't take an oath about that.

While nobody wants to return to national parties, there used to be a lot of talk about the possibility of partially or completely electing the Chamber via one big 'Federal Constituency', which was supposed to increase the legitimacy of politicians in the other half of the country and would solve the B-H-V mess as well . This idea seems to have been shelfed now the N-VA is dominant, though.

I'm Flemish by the way, though I hope/don't think my style of reporting events has been overtly coloured by that fact. :)

Well if it had been obvious from your reporting which side you were from I wouldn't have had to ask. ;) I'm actually 1/8th Wallonian.

Another question, from what I've understood Wallonia is more left-wing, while Flansers is fairly right-wing, but I've also understod that Wallonia traditionally has been wealthier than the Flemish parts of the country. Shouldn't that mean that Wallonia should be more right-wing, and Flanders more left-wing?   

Wallonia's past wealth is due to a huge coal mining industry (it was the most industrialized part of Europe in the 19th century with Britain) and Flanders' past poverty is due to it being a rural agrarian society. Nowadays, Wallonia is poorer.

Living and working conditions in Wallonia in the nineteenth century were even worse than over here. So Flanders Poor/Wallonia Rich isn't really the right way of looking at the past in Belgium. It would make more sense to argue that Wallonia (or at least large parts of it) was/is home to one of the first industrial societies in Europe (with all that that entails), while Flanders remained for a long time significantly more agricultural and never industrialised in the same way.

The big one here is 'used to be'. Wallonia is tremendously impoverished and has a killer unemployment grade of 14-15% (and that's down on the 20% unemployment they had some time ago). They simply missed the boat on the last wave of modernizations and have been stuck for some time now with a outdated industry. The consequences are dying inner cities and industrial area's. Flanders on the other hand is one of the wealthiest area's in the world, though the period of rapid economical growth seems to have peaked.

While the general right-wingness of Flanders is partly explained by this discrepancy, there are other factors at work. Wallonia's higher degree  of industrialization in the early 20th century resulted in a stronger socialist movement, whereas Flanders remained stuck with rural catholicism and  a predominantly catholic worker's movement. There is the century or so of actual oppresion of the Flemish/Dutch language and Flemish culture from 1830 onwards, which people seem determined to never forget about, that's still helping the nationalists to hold on to a core voting public even in difficult circumstances like the 1990s and early 2000s.

Probably the single most fundamental factor- even if one might have difficulties observing it today- is the way Catholicism is a part of the Flemish identity, explained by the Eighty Years War, which saw the Protestant Netherlands break free of the Habsburgs, while the modern day Belgium and Luxemburg remained Catholic and Spanish. (One might argue they remained Spanish because they were Catholic). The real Other for the Flanders of the 17-19th century were the Protestant Seven Provinces, which blockaded the Port of Antwerp into obscurity and which confirmed Flanders in its Catholicism simply by being there. Untill the 1960s Flanders was one of the pillars of European Catholicism (comparable to the modern day RoI).

This is what has changed in recent decades and what will give the entire concept of Belgium a tough time : we find ourselves in the same country as the poor Wallonia, ressent sseing Flemish tax money disappearing into what the Flemish media loves to present as a bottomless pit, and at the same time conclude that the one factor that pushed Flanders towards Belgium, its Catholicism, no longer plays an important role. While Flemish-Nationalism still is implicitly Catholic, the radical opposition to the Calvinist Other to the north is slowly disappearing. Combined with a level of prosperity not matched since the 1540s, Flanders feels greatly confident, and is willing to go along in the Nationalist narrative.

On the Yzer tower (a monument for the Flemish deaths of WW I and, by extension, for Flemish Nationalim) the following much-revealing letters are ingraved:
              
              A
           V V K
              V

Which stand for: 'Alles Voor Vlaanderen' (Everything For Flanders) and 'Vlaanderen Voor Kristus' (Flanders for Christ) or 'Vlaanderen Voor de Kerk' (Flanders For the Church).

Ah right very intresting, so nowadays Flanders is a lot wealthier than Wallonia, and Wallonia's previous "wealth" had a lot to do with a strong and well-developt industry that is nowadays outdated. Wallonia does kind of sound like the Swedish North, used to be rather wealthy due to industry, but is becoming increasingly poor, with high unemployment numbers, and the South basicly seeing it as a hopeless bottomless hole who steal our tax-money.

Alright, I'm a lot more educated now.

     

It's actually exactly like that. :)

We did it! Belgium breaks the world record for forming a government and joins the ranks of suche legends as Iraq 2010, Netherlands 2010 and... Belgium 2007-2008! (seriously all the cool formations took place in the last 2-3 years).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/8328926/Belgium-breaks-Iraqs-249-day-record-without-a-government.html

While some countries might not be too enthusiastic about beating Iraq in any category, we as a nation understood the importance of holding a celebration for such a lofty occasion.

http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/3625/De-Formatie/article/detail/1224203/2011/02/17/Gekke-Belgen-vieren-bedenkelijk-wereldrecord.dhtml  (for pics of a record party in Ghent)

Congratulasions

Update: Common sense has it that there won't be a government and that the only reason we're not yet in full campaign modus is that the EU demands a functional budget in March. An election is likely in either May or June. Another scenario I'm hearing more frequently is yet another caretaker government led this time by Leterme.

If Leterme still is PM on the 31st December 2011, that'll be an epic fail.

Oh, and our Foreign Affairs Minister, Steven Vanackere, had a rather bad week as the media gave him a hard time over his vote to put Libya in the Human Rights Commision of the United Nations. Also, many of the weapons used to kill freedom-loving protestors appear to have been made by FN near Liege. So, after selling machineguns to Nepal's Maoist rebels and nuclear installments to Iran, our industry appears to have found an exciting new market.

A semi-general strike today in Flanders, as the socialist union ABVV and the liberal union ACLVB protested the Inter Professional Agreement (IPA), which had been rejected by large majorities of their members. The largest union, the christian ACV, did accept the IPA, despite only a very slight majority of their members accepting it, and their affiliate LBC-NVK outright rejecting it. The main point of discontent seems to be the way the IPA would move towards an end of the automatical pairing of the CPI and wages to counter inflation, and the old problem of what exactly the difference should be between the statute of a worker and that of an employee. More importantly there's a lot of discontent about the government just executing the IPA, in spite of it not being accepted by all social partners.

The strike strikes (yeah, yeah, pun inetended and all) me as having been a bit of a failure though, as I didn't experience any real irregularities when taking the train across most of Flanders and an inter-city bus today. Also the government didn't seem really impressed, and employers appear to be winning the spinning war, eagerly helped in that endeavour by journalists who seem to confuse corporate spin with objective reporting. Oh well.

So another round-up:

-CD&V leader Wouter Beke now is appointed as 'Royal Negotiator', but the real players in round 6579 of the negotiations seem to be Di Rupo and De Wever.

-There were some noises about ditching the N-VA from within the OpenVLD, most notably from Mathias De Clerq, the grandson of Liberal éminence grise Willy De Clerg and the political heir to former PM Verhofstadt. The OpenVLD leadership was quick to crush those noises, but it was a first nonetheless. The N-VA also seems eager to tackle itself as it has stated it wants to end negotiations before April is over or leave the table. The N-VA walking away is of course the wet dream of half the negotiating parties.

-The Federal Budget is being drafted by the outgoing government, which was quick to exclude the N-VA from the process.

Flanders poll by VRT & De Standaard (compared with the June 2010 results in Flanders):

N-VA 31.5% (+3.3%)
CD&V 18.2% (+0.6%)
Open VLD 14.0% (nc)
sp.a 13.2% (-1.7%)
Vlaams Belang 10.4% (-2.2%)
Groen! 8.8% (+1.7%)
LDD 2.8% (-0.9%)

Only 17% of the voters indicate that they would vote for a different party now than they did last year.

I was about to post this, but on the other hand maybe it's good someone else took it on himself to handle this pile of manure.

A nice example of breathtaking hypocrisy today, as outgoing PM Leterme lashed out at N-VA leader De Wever, calling his actions so far a 'failure' and noting that a fifth of the legislature has already passed.

Poll by La Libre Belgique (traditionally the most accurate and prestigious pollster) in all 3 regions, Wallonia especially is very, very interesting:

Wallonie

PS: 33 (-4)
MR 24 (+2)
Ecolo: 14 (+2)
cdH: 10 (-2)
FN: 6.5 (+5) !

Very poor showing for the cdH, probably their worst polling result ever, I'd have to check though. PS losing ground when everybody thought they'd be surging as francophones would gather around the flag. MR only a couple of points from their 2007 result and probably very happy with this poll. Ecolo does as ecolo usually does in polls. The big shock here of course is the FN score, which is much better than we're used from them.  It should be noted that these 3 surprising resultsd (cdH, PS, FN) caused la Libre itself to be cautious about the poll.

Bruxelles-Brussel

MR: 29 (+2)
PS: 24 (-3)
Ecolo: 10 (-2)
cdH: 10 (-2)
PP: 3
CD&V: 2,8
FN: 2,5
N-VA: 2,1
SP.a: 2,0
GROEN!: 1,8
OpenVLD: 1,7
Vlaams Belang: 0,9

The MR retaking the clear lead in what historically is their strongest area, as the other parties all seem to lose some ground. Notice that the PS and cdH results are very much in line with the surprising results from the Wallonia poll. The PP seems like a dead bird and the FN does win a bit of terrain. the Flemish part of the poll is probably useless for anything, but the poor VB showing is notable nonetheless.

Vlaanderen

N-VA: 33 (+6)
CD&V: 16 (-1)
SP.a: 14 (-1)
OpenVLD: 12 (-1)
Vlaams Belang 13 (+1)
GROEN!: 8 (+1)
LDD: 3,5

N-VA winning support after 300+ days without a government, as the traditional parties continue to crumble. VB seems like it's reverting it ill fortunes of late and the Greens show that they're the only really consistent party in all these polls. LDD continues to be a ridiculous, useless almost-extinct race. La Libre does point out that N-VA+VB+LDD = 50, but that's a useless observation as &) the combo VB+ CD&V/N-VA + LDD in 2007 scored even better and é) LDD rather counterintuitively has the most unionist, monarchist electorate.

The Francophone Community (one of Belgium's 3 communities along with the Flemish Community and the German Community, as opposed to the three Regions (dutch: gewest): the Walloon, the Flemish and the Brussels Capital Region)  will change its name to 'Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles".

This strikes me personally as a bit of an agressive move to remind Flanders of the francophone supremacy in Brussels, which historically is a Flemish city and which in separatist and nationalist rhetoric is seen as an 'unalienable' part of Flanders. The main obstacle to an eventual Belgian break-up is that noone in Flanders would ever give up Brussels voluntarily.

This also fits within a larger trend of closer ties between the "WalloBrux". Most famously the idea of a corridor between the territory of Brussels and that of Wallonia, which was circulated in 2007.

And because it perhaps is a good idea to point out why I dislike the N-VA, here's a story about their latest high-profile member.

This weekend Vic van Aelst, a celebrity lawyer, bought himself a membership card of the N-VA. Van Aelst previously was a municipal Councillor for the VU (the N-VA's more centrist, left-liberal predecessor) in the 1970s. Today Van Aelst is in the news argueing that Flanders should stop teaching kids French as a 2nd language. Along with the usual arguments (only 3% of the world population knows some French, it's no longer a world language,...) he also is kind enough to offer us an insight into the mind of a Flemish Nationalist (Note: this is how these people actually think):


And before that this gem:


This is exactly the childish, narrow mentality that's typical for the N-VA.

Ten months today, guys!

This week also marked the first anniversary of the fall of the Leterme II government after OpenVLD pulled out.

More importantly this week also saw a split in the socialist SP.a, as former leadership candidate Erik de Bruyn left to create a new radical Leftwing movement, Rood! (Red!). Common wisdom is that de Bruyn will try to create some sort of union with the PvdA+. De Bruyn won a third of the vote in the SP.a's 2007 leadership election, albeit mostly protest votes. He was the leader of the leftwing SP.a ROOD tendency (which itself is basically the remainder of the Vonk tendency which split off the main party a long time ago to become the LSP, a sworn enemy of the PVDA+ ever since) within the party and is unlikely to be missed by its leadership.

Still, this marks the end of the SP.a as a credible party to the real Left, if you ask me. They have very few real hardliners left. Only Rudy Kennes, who has some good union credentials, jumps to mind, and I wouldn't be too surprised if even he would make the jump now. I don't know whether de Bruyn might pull of what everyone on the Hard Left has been dreaming of for decades and make it into parliament, though. He seems to aim for the 2012 municipal elections, which may very well also be federal elections. If he can find just three percent of the 15% SP.a electorate ready to follow him though (what few working class voters there remain within the party), he and the PVDA+ should be able to do it. Anyway I'll make sure tofollow him up close.

The Belgian Chamber of Representatives today voted to accept a Burqah ban in public by a 147-1 margin. The lone opposer was Eva Brems (Groen!), former leader of Amnesty International Flanders. Meyrem Almaci (Groen!) and Zoe Genot (Ecolo) abstained. A very bleak day for civil rights in Belgium.

How come that even the Belgian Socialists approved of a Burqa ban? As far as I remember, in France the Socialists were opposed to the ban, and the same holds for Swiss cantonal parliaments where it's usually the right parties which are in favour of such a ban and where the left parties are against it.

Mainly because they and the liberals want to style themselves as secular and do in fact have quite the secular tradition. Belgium (and Flanders in particular) is of course to the right of France on these issues. Actually, the party whose vote I'm most surprised by is the cdH, which always seemed happy to aim at the muslim vote, has a catholic past and actually has an MP in the Brussels parliament wearing a headscarf.

Laïcité now roughly translating as 'making it very clear to the darkies that they don't belong here'.

From its old meaning of "Keep the Papists away from our kids!"

Today CD&V leader Beke presented his report on the Linguistic (best translation of the French/Dutch 'Communautaire') problems in the formation to the king. Everyone expects he will now assign either De Wever as informateur or Di Rupo as formateur. Probably Di Rupo though. Lately De Wever has seemed eager to get to the point of having a government.

New elections seem very unlikely right now as there have been leaks from the palace establishing that the king had clealry stated to all party leaders that he would not sign the writ for another election. This also seems to be the last possible date to call an election untill September, as Belgium doesn't do Summer elections. Meaning we'll have at least 3 more months of drama (or, you know, a government).

PS-leader Elio Di Rupo was appointed as formateur by the King today. His mission is very clearly to form a government. I feel sort of hopefull. A Prime Minister Di Rupo would be one of the best things to come out of Belgian politics in the past 5 years or so.

If Di Rupo does become PM, he'll be the first Walloon and the first socialist to hold that post since Leburton in 1980 (Leburton's reign was a bit of a failure though). He'll also be one of the first openly gay/immigrant Heads Of State or Government in Europe if not the world.

Iceland (of all places) beat you to it.

First openly gay man, though, unless you count that guy who was interim PM in Norway (I think it was Norway) for four days a while ago.

Yes, that's true. First openly bow-tie wearing for quite a while as well, I suspect.

Sometimes I forget just how awfull Belgian politics can get :(

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is now asking for the resignation of Justice minister Stefaan De Clerck (,who's a despicable failure, filthy rich and represents the worst form of politician Belgium seems to produce in sizeable quantities) after De Clerk's remarks on the ongoing debate about amnesty for the 'collaborateurs' of WWII. (Yeah, that's been picked up again by the Senate, :( :( :( ).

De Clerck had said that it was time to 'forgive and forget' about the collaboration. Which is a pretty awfull quote no matter what you're position about the issue is. In the mean time Wouter Beke and De Clerck himself have stated that he meant that we should try to have a katharsis about the issue 'without minimalizing the facts'. Right,...

But it is nice to see the forgiving side of de Clerck whose last encounter with scandal came when he had an ex-gangster on parole re-arrested for very unconvincing reasons. Why the man had been convicted in the first place? Partly because of his involvement in the abduction of a certain Anthony De Clerck, a nephew of none other than...Stefaan De Clerck!

Before that De Clerck had also led the CD&V on the shiny path towards nationalism and to another crushing defeat in the 2003 election. He also had been forced to resign as Justice Minister in the Dehaene government after the escape of Marc Dutroux.

Guardian/Le Monde article on the amnesty story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/24/belgium-crisis-nazi-collaboration-amnesty

Can someone explain SP.a's behaviour?

Last paragraph:

The sp.a only voted to bring the bill on the Senate floor for debate, I'd be very, very surprised if they voted to pass it. If they did though that would be the end of any sense of allegiance I've got left for the party. The sad truth is that all Flemish parties seem to have decided that living a shadow life as the pets of the N-VA for now is better than having to take the risk of being the ones blamed for 'breaking the Flemish front'. I think this is stupid, even with purely electoral considerations in mind.


'Commentators' in the international press have been believing that for 4 years now. That still doesn't mean it's a real option. Flemish independence would be very, very painfull to Flanders, as it would cut its ties to Brussels, which generates a lot of Flemish wealth. Only the craziest separatists would back such a procedure.

Longer than four years, but, yeah, it has become the consensus of the self-styled 'hard headed realists' amongst press commentators in recent years.

Things are heating up here as the PS and the N-VA seem set to clash on the economy. Earlier in the week the so-called 'monitoring commitee' of high-placed civil servants had indicated that the amount of money  the next government would have to cut or raise was 22 Billion rather than the 17 Billion we've been hearing about for the past year or so, thus creating pressure on the parties to form a government. (One could argue that was the whole point of their report)
Today the European Commision published a list of recommendations for the Belgian government, which effectively was an all-out attack on the Welfare state, proposing to raise the retirement age, to lower the costs of wages, and to end the automatical linking of the consumer index to wages, which is at the core of Belgian employment policies. The report was very warmly received by N-VA and OpenVLD, and very reluctantly by the PS. The SP.a failed to really stand out by having an opinion.
I can't see how a government can be formed with parties that disagree so vehemently on almost everything and most commentators agree by now predicting an autumn election.

Will Belgium have a goverment ever again?

Today is the 1 year anniversary of the elections of 13 June 2010.

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Flanders poll by VRT

The bar on the left is the result of the elections of June 2010. N-VA support keeps increasing.

Yes, 1 year on and still no government.

PM Leterme sneered at the negotiators today in the Dutch newspaper Trouw saying that winning elections is nice, but that they should really be able to look beyond their own interests. Oh the irony.

What are the polls looking like on the other side of the linguistic border?

Not much change, though we had a freak one a couple of months back that showed cdH an PS losing some terrain to the MR, and an ascendant FN. I'd still predict that both N-VA and PS would pick up some seats if elections were tomorrow.

New negotiations between the N-VA and CD&V and OpenVLD about the formation of a 'Flemish Front'. ugh.

Forgive me for being uninformed, but what sort of impact would that have on the formation of a government?

It would mean that both the CD&V and the OpenVLD would become effectively sattelites of the N-VA as far as the formation is concerned, I suppose. But then, those parties already were behaving as if they were. So the only change would be that there would be strictly no change in the negotiations.

I must say that in a perverted sort of way, I'm highly amused by the CD&V's current situation. They clearly are scared to death of a centre-right government which would attack the welfare state, and yet they are unable to end the strangle-hold the N-VA has over them.

The last week or so has surely been interesting.

First and foremost, Bart Dewever and FDF-leader Olivier Maingain have illustrated once more that a government with the N-VA and the MR would be a match made in heaven, after Maingain called the N-VA 'radically tatcherite, the final result of conservatism and egotism'. Showing off his great rhetorical skills, De Wever replied by insinuating that Maingain should perhaps start using his medecines again, which didn't go down too well with Maingain, who now compared De Wever to Viktor Orban and Haider. All this resulted in some degree of panic at MR Headquarters, where Charles Michel sort of reprimanded Maingain, presumably while praying to his masonic gods that this infortunate affair would not be problematic for his lovefest with the N-VA on the economy, or, even worse, result in the FDF leaving the MR and in the process crushing all hope of ever again being the No.1 in Wallonia.

And then some rag also chose today to publish some text messages they had somehow received, which supposedly prove that a) Yves Leterme has a secret lover or at least had one in late 2009 and b) that he tried to get her a job at the Foreign Ministry when he was Foreign Affairs minister. This is actually probably true as Leterme seems to have had more luck than anything else so far when it comes to semi-scandals coming out. On at least two occasions his Twitter account featured messages which quite clearly weren't meant to be read by most of the people who wound up reading them. The guy seems to be worse at these things than Anthony Weiner.

Ah, Belgium. That strangely high density of Surrealists makes sense, doesn't it?

The Maingain-De Wever disagreement seems to be spilling out of control after Maingain called De Wever a negationist today. Maingain really went the full distance in an interview with Le Soir today, referring to De Wever's meeting with Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, his presence on the funeral of Karel Dillen, who founded the Vlaams Blok, and his 'negationist remarks'. Those accusations of negationism date back to 2007 when the francophone writer and columnist Pierre Mertens attacked De Wever over his own remarks about collaboration of the Antwerp Municipal Authority in 1940-1945, argueing that Antwerp was a victim of the occupators itself. These remarks were an attack by De Wever on Antwerp mayor Patrick Janssens (SP.a), who had issued an apology for the collaboration of the Antwerp Police Force and administration (among others).

Personally I consider De Wever's remarks beyond tasteless, especially since there is the simple fact that the Brussels Administration refused collaboration and that 'only' a few hundred of the Brussels Jews were murdered during the Shoah, whereas the Antwerp Administration did collaborate, for whatever reasons they may have had for that, and that tens of thousands of Antwerp Jews were murdered as a result. The degree to which the Shoah was successful in the Low Countries (even worse in the Netherlands), compared to for example Scandinavia, is a historical fact, and De Wever trying to diminish that for cheap political gain is on the edge of nauseating. Everybody knows he wants to be the next mayor of Antwerp, but should he really use every occasion he gets to attack Janssens, even when sensitive issues like this are involved?

That said, I do wonder what Maingain thinks he’s doing. I can’t see Charles Michel being amused by this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the MR likes power more than it likes the FDF, even if the consequences of dropping the FDF would be pretty damning for their electoral profile, especially in Brussels.

Slightly better news now, as we should get ready for the one and only Flemish Socialist Leadership Election.

Incumbent leader Caroline Gennez today announced that she will not stand for re-election. Gennez was handpicked as leader by her predecessor Johan Vandelanotte in 2007. She won a tumultuous leadership election against left-wing firebrand Erik De Bruyn, with closer than expected numbers (66-33 or something) and generally never really managed to control the party. Her leadership also was clouded by the clumsy way she tried to eliminate Frank Vandenbroucke, the party's most popular official, from his ministerpost in the wake of the 2009 regional elections. She never really became popular either. In full, it seems safe to assume that her disappearance is a semi-good case for the party.

()
The obvious heir to the throne is Bruno Tobback, member of the Chamber of Representatives. Tobback is the son of party monument Louis Tobback, who led the party back in the 1980s and 1990s and who to this day is the mayor of Leuven. This might seem like a bad case of nepotism, but one should remember how incredibly small the Belgian political genepool is. Right now, almost the entire young generation of the OpenVLD consists out of the sons of former ministers, leaders,...
Tobback is one of the more charismatic Belgian politicians and certainly one of the better speakers in parliament. Also, he strikes me as pretty acceptable on the issues.

()
One unexpected challenger might be the current mayor of Ghent, Daniel Termont, who seems to have been on a bit of a charm offensive lately. Termont is at least being floated around by some analysts who supposedly know what they're talking about. Termont doesn't really have an outspoken profile, but if he runs I do suppose that he would profile himself as a Union man, as he started his career with the Socialist mutualities. It's also possible that's he just positioning himself for the job of vice-leader.

De Morgen has a a good political Post Mortem about Gennez today (for the few of you who can read Dutch):

http://www.demorgen.be/dm/nl/5036/Wetstraat/article/detail/1284681/2011/06/28/De-sp-a-onder-Gennez-het-mocht-iets-minder-zijn.dhtml

Quite an eventfull few days over here. On monday Di Rupo presented a report that was generaly received well and that would form the base of the Coalition Agreement. It foresaw  cuts in social security and healthcare, combined with new taxes on large capitals and company cars.

The report was received well by the Francophone parties, OpenVLD and SP.a. The CD&V decided that pretending to have any autonomy was a lost cause anyway, and just communicated that it would do as the N-VA did. The N-VA decided that it wanted more: deeper cuts and more responsibility/autonomy for the regions.

I thought the report was pretty strong stuff, and it certainly went beyond the stuff I would have been willing to swallow in return for a Socialist PM.  So did all (!) Belgian Unions. And I'm quite sure that if Flemish popular opinion would have had the opportunity to actually care about anything beyond the linguistic war that's been raging since 2007, it wouldn't have liked the general tone of the report either. The shocking truth is that the N-VA doesn't seem to want a solution, that its economical policies would be hugely unpopular and that absolutely nobody seems to care. The Flemish media are horribly inept and don't seem to grasp the difference between actually important issues and the issues people are shouting the loudest about. I'm very pessimistic about the future of this country.

Anyway, as I'm out of the country for the next 2 weeks, without reliable internet acces, you guys will perhaps be better informed about what happens next than I am.

And I bump this thread, because things are getting started again.

We now have 7 parties sitting around the negotiating table, to try and flesh out the Di Rupo report to a principal agreement for the next government. The PS, sp.a, MR, OVLD, and CDh are no surprises at this point of the formation, the CD&V is. Wouter Beke asked and got a guarantee that negotiations would be holding his conditions in the back of their mind when they'd get startes, and in return agreed to break his party's ties to the N-VA.

The N-VA likely not being in the next government is a pretty big deal (,obviously,) and the big question is what voters will make of it. In that respect, it's crucial that negotiations get somewhere before the end of September and the start of a parliamentary year that will be dominated by the run-up to next year's municipial elections, which may well be the most important elections in Belgium since the 1990s, as the future of the Flemish right lies in the balance. If the N-VA can unroot the CD&V and VB, and create its own strong, local networks and structures, the former parties may very well be done for, and we will be left without credible non-nationalist conservatives, the consequences of which would be huge. 

At the same time, the N-VA is having a couple of rough weeks, as they are still in limbo when it comes to the question whether they'll get stuck with the blame for the current fiasco. Today, BDW once again gave a rare interview which only served to illustrate why not giving too much interviews is a wise policy. Saying that he hoped for the negotiators to fail, and saying that it was just the same with the ecologists and Fukishima, may prove to have been a uncarefull move, even if the laughably incompetent Flemish media failed to point that out.

Also today, we had a failed edition of the 'Gordel', a semi-political, recreational happening which aims to stress the Flemish character of the area surrounding Brussels, which failed to attract a lot of people and/or prominent politicians. Might this be an apt metaphor for a separatist engine running out of steam? (The much more important Ijzer Pilgrimage, a huge, explicitlyb political gathering which serves to commemorate the Flemish dead of WWI and the pacifist character of the Flemish Movement, also was low on inflammatory rhetoric and high on people showing restraint.)

So, it looks like Belgium is gonna make it?

Oh no, it's wtill way to early to predict something like that, it's just more likely than a year ago.

As it happens, I had the opportunity to overhear quite a bit of the slightly too loud conversation of a couple of N-VA operatives (I assume they were that, as they seemed to know the ins and outs of the political scene and did have the habit of referring to BDW as 'Bart', and voiced the opinions to go with it) in a Brussels café last friday, and they surely did not seem to think Belgium was about to make it. But then again, I assume they'd be the last ones to believe something like that.

And I should perhaps drop a little 'we did it' here, as last thursday night the 8 negotiating parties managed a break-trough on the most troublesome major issue: the electoral district of Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, which will be broken up before the next federal elections, in return for the possibility to register to vote in Brussels for the inhabitants of 6 mainly-francophone municipalities in Flanders and a statute that would be equivalent to that of mayor for 3 francophone mayor-elects in Flanders, who still were awaiting the confirmation of their election from the Flemish government.

Of course this still is only a first step, but I'd be surprised if the parties weren't in too deep to back down now. Other issues include the financing of the regions and the deficit (as center-left daily De Morgen put it: B-H-V Broken Up!!! (Now we only have to safe the Welfare State)) as well as the exact make-up of the next government.

The MR-FDF alliance already has broken up over the agreement and it's a distinct possibility that the Greens may yet be dropped from the coalition.

Interesting. So, why did the MR-FDF split?

The FDF's core electorate (well, only electorate, even if they now nominally exist in Wallonia proper) are francophones in Brussels or the 'rand' (area directly surrounding Brussels, which is part of Flanders but very francophone in places). To these people anything short of an adhesion of large parts of the 'rand' to Brussels would be seen as selling out. When this deal was struck the FDF really had little choice left.

Another thing to remember is that the FDF is not strictly speaking a liberal, or even right-wing party, like the MCC and the PRL were. It is centrist to centre-left on economical issues and it's common grounfd with the remainder of the MR is mainly that both aren't the PS and that they're both targeting a similar electorate.

And my initial hopefull expectations are proven largely right, as the negotiators have reached agreements about more fiscal autonomy for the regions and the situation in Brussels (,tho the latter one is perhaps a bit meagre). This time next week, Belgium may very well have a government again.

The N-VA's reaction is laughably inadequate, and often doesn't amount to anything beyond rehearsing some stale talking points and predictable hyperboloc assaults on the agreements that have been reached. I'd be surprised if they didn't start a long and painfull decline in polls over the next months.

And we do actually have a 'new' poll, (taken by La Libre Belgique between 9 and 19 september, mainly before negotiations started to do tremendous)

Flanders:

N-VA   36%
CD&V  15.1% (sad, really)
sp.a    14.1%
OVLD  12.5%
VB       10.7%
Groen  7.2% (who knows, one of these days the greens may beat the VB)
LDD     <1% (lol)

Wallonia:

PS          37.1%
MR          21.9%
Ecolo      13.8%
CDh        13.4% (note: the CDh now has a new leader: Benoit Lutgen, who still is quite close to Milquet)
no FN (despite their bump in that poll last spring)

Brussels:

PS         26.3%
MR         25.4%
Ecolo     12.7% (quite weak)
CDh       10%
Flemish breakdown unavailable (?)

Notes:

* Let's just hope this poll doesn't muddle the waters enough to enable the N-VA to claim that Flanders rejects the aforementioned agreements. This poll is clearly largely useless by now, except as an indicator of the impact of the new developments which we'll see in the next poll.

*No mention of the FN, might mean that their last polling result was an irrelevant blip, or that La Libre needs to get its reporting tidied up.

*Also interesting is that the PS now almost certainly is by far the largest party in Brussels. Again, we'll need to see the next poll to know how much support MR will lose over the FDF-split

*Perhaps also interesting are the personal ratings of the politicians, which are variable across the regions, but surprisingly all regions have representatives of the 'other side' in their top 3.

Wallonia:
Di Rupo (PS)   52%
Milquet  (CDh) 27%
Verhofstadt (OVLD)/Javaux (ecolo) 24%

Brussels:
Di Rupo (PS) 48%
Reynders (MR) 29%
Verhofstadt (OVLD) 25%

Flanders:
BDW (N-VA) 56% (really, Flanders?)
Di Rupo (PS) 31%
De Croo (OVLD) 28% (wtf,wtf,wtf)

Also, quite funny how much some francophones now seel to love Verhofstadt. (Though I do believe the Dutch must love him even more, going from the way he's sometimes portrayed in their media).

The best thing Belgium could do would be splitting into two states.

Brussels should stay neutral and stateless by becoming the "capital" of the European Union; it would act as good as the the transatlantic analog to Washington D.C.

And on and on goes the negotiating machine that the Eight Party Talks have become. We now also have managed to split the judicial arondissement B-H-V, which one should not confuse with the constituency as well as settling some less important issues.

The reaction of the Flemish Nationalists is pretty idiotic. De Wever himself managed to almost sound like some sort of unpleasant1990s Vlaams Blok politician by remarking that the B-H-V deal (which would enable anyone to have a trial in his or her primary language anywhere in Belgium) 'was equivalent to the presence of Turkish or Moroccan judges in Bruges or Ghent'. Also, there's a lot of whining about the non-availibility of the actual texts of the agreements to the opposition. Not a very smart move.

The absolute prize in idiocy must however be awarded to the Flemish federal representatives from Brussels who only now noticed that with the Flemish voters from Eastern Flemish Brabant cut off from Brussels, and with the Senate's current form abolished there was absolutely no way they would ever be able to get elected in an 85%-90% francophone Brussels, with quite a few voters on the Flemish left also less than totally determined to vote on their side of the linguistical divide.

The great ambition/idée fixe of the N-VA (and by extension of the entire Flemish political spectre) always implied that significant numbers of Flemish-Brussels voters would in practice be disenfranchised, or at the very least that Flemsih-Brussels politicians on the federal level would become a rarity. The fact that people only notice now that unfortunate side-effect to disenfranchising francophone voters in the Rand is really, really idiotic.

I don't know whether anyone actually reads this thread, but on this historic day not posting something would almost be a crime.

Today the negotiators presented the blueprint for the 6th Constitutional Reform (Staatshervorming) in Belgian History. This should see the power of the regions bolstered, and their fiscal autonomity improved. I could explain further, but it's not really interesting if you don't live here, so I won't.

Not unimportant for the people on this site, it'll also have quite important electoral repercussions. (As I've already pointed out before). Firstly, the bilingual electoral district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde is gone, to be replaced with one unilingual Flemish-Brabant electoral district and one bilingual Brussels district. Secondly, the Senate will from now on be elected by the regional parliaments, meaning that there now is no way any given politician could rpesent himself to the whole of Flanders or Wallonia, let alone to the whole of the country. (:() Most importanly, perhaps, from 2014 on regional, European, and federal elections will all fall on the same Mega-Sunday, leaving only the municipal/provincial elections as a 'referendum' on the government. This also means federal terms will now last 5 years. The election date will be set by the regional parliaments and will probably be semi-hardcoded in the constitution.

I'm obviously a bit angry about the disappearance of anything resembling a 'nationwide constituency', especially as a truly federal electoral district has been a recurring theme in public debate since at least 2006 or so. The future Senate seems like a recipe to get a useless chamber filled with the products of nepotism and inner-party dealings, rather than a meeting-place between the regions that would have any actual impact .

I'm quite mixed about the joining together of all major elections. I regret the loss of all possibility of a different dynammic on the regional and the federal level, but on the other hand symmetric coalitions should make the relations between the two levels easier. Also, we will no longer have a major election every 2-3 years, with all the consequences for public discourse that one can easily imagine.

The one major problem that I see here is that we may see a completely dysfunctional situation where the federal government has fallen, but new elections cannot possibly be called. I hope that possibility is seriously considered in the final document.

The formation of an actual government should be under way from today, and will likely be a matter of days and weeks, rather than of months :)

Mightn't some of the Francophone parties just run in Flanders? Seems like they should be able to get over the threshold just from votes in Halle-Vilvoorde given how low the threshold is.

Interestingly, this already happens on the regional level, where the Union des Francophones (basically an alliance of PS, MR, FDF, and CDh) has had a Member in the Flemish Parliament for as long as that institution exists.

And there just might be enough votes in Flemish-Brabant to manage the same on the federal level, (though I dare to doubt this as 1/122 is easier than 1/85 or something like that, and a 5% treshold is quite high when you don't have any voters in half your constituency.). But the major issue there is that an additional representative in the federal parliament would weigh on the inter-party balance of power in Wallonia. I can't see the PS give the MR an additional liberal-leaning representative, or vice-versa. Never say never, though.

And the Greens are out (, mainly because OVLD didn't want to govern with Groen!). Which means we're heading for a classical tripartite Government.

The interesting bit is whether the Greens will retaliate, as Wouter van Besien already hinted they might only last week.

Anyway, I've still to post this VRT/DS poll which dates back to last week:

N-VA: 35,0%
CD&V: 19,3%
SP.a: 14,4%
O-VLD: 11.9%
Groen!: 9,2% (!!)
VB: 8,2% (!!!!!!)
LDD: 1,7%

As I sort of predicted, Groen! is now ahead of the VB and the only non-N-VA party that's significantly up.

Also, an opinion poll published today suggest 43% of Belgians thinks Nazism 'contains interesting ideas'.

And the immense failure that is Belgian politics after 2007 continues as 'formateur' Di Rupo resigned today when he faield to reach an agreement with OVLD/MR about the extent to which the Belgian social security system should be destroyed. The N-VA is calling for an 'emergency government without the socialists'. If that happens I'll buy an sp.a membership card.

So, what do you think about the idea of splitting Belgium in Flemish and Walloonian countries?

(sorry if you have answered this already)

Looked like we were back to square 1 for a moment, but today an agreement was reached on financial measures to be taken in order to stop the alarming rate at which Belgian interest had been rising troughout the latter half of the week (Going from 5 to 5,85% in a matter of days) and as a reaction to our 'degradation' with S&P. (Frankly, who takes these people seriously?).

This means we're heading for the actual formation of a government. All that has to be done now is the partition of posts in the next federal government. We already know neither sp.a leader Bruno Tobback nor OpenVLD leader Alexander De Croo will be cabinet ministers in that government. (There are way too many tier-1 en tier-2 politicians proportional to the number of cabinet positions.)



Short answer, I think it an abhorrent, unrealistic idea that is also not wanted by a majority of either the Flemish or the Walloons.

And we have a government! (after only, what, 541 days of formation? That still is pretty good, no?)

Oaths would be taken on Monday, so in just 4 short days, Di Rupo I should be a fact with as main attraction the first socialist Prime Minister of Belgium in 37 years.

Fingers crossed until the swearing in is finished, right?

Today and yesterday all 6 parties of the next government had the goverbing agreement ratified by their membership, without noteworthy opposition.

Speculation about the cabinet can now begin. I've amused myself by trying to make a little list, even if it's useless for 99,9% of readers here:

Certainties:
Elio Di Rupo (PS) as Prime Minister
Joelle Milquet (cdH) as vice-Prime Minister (though she has been very uncommiting on the topic, don't think there'll be a major surprise though)
Didier Reynders (MR) as Vice-PM (major victory in the ongoing MR civil strife over the Michel family)
Laurette Onkelinx (PS), probably also a vice-PM, though it may also go to:
Paul Magnette (PS), who still is the party's heir to Di Rupo

(Very) Likely:
Vincent van Quickenborne (OpenVLD) as Vice-PM (???)
Steven Vanackere (CD&V), probably as vice-PM, if he doesn't make it in, we might have:
Servais Verherstraete (CD&V)
Pieter de Crem (CD&V)
Johan Vandelanotte (SP.a) very likely as Vice-PM
Annemie Turtelboom (OpenVLD)

Who Knows:
Charles Michel (MR), can't really see this happen, though I'm curious about the second MR cabinet position
Marianne Thyssen (CD&V), again that would be quite the come-back, don't see it happen
Wouter Beke (CD&V), probably likes his party leadership too much to risk it
Caroline Gennez (SP.a), very high profile and with no other plausible future on the same level, yet unpopular.I actually suspect we'll see a blandish second SP.a minister, like
Renaat Landuyt or Dirk Vermaelen or the more exciting John Crombez*
Benoit Lutgen (cdH), in the unlikely case of two cdH ministers, why not???
Karl-Heinz Lambertz (PS), now this would be fun

*: does have the handicap of being Vandelanotte's former cabinet chief, the inner-party balance might be disturbed by having both of them be minister


Oh, and there's a new poll by La Libre Belqique showing the N-VA at 39.8%. Fun times!!

Congrats to Belgium on rejoining the developed world!


So if my math is right the new government is made up of...

40 Socialists, 27 from Waloonia and 13 from Flanders.

28 Liberals, 15 from Waloonia and 13 from Flanders.

and 26 Christian-Democrats, 17 from Flanders and 9 from Waloonia.

Giving the government, 51 members from Waloonia and 43 from Flanders.

In opposition is the Flemish Alliance at 27, the pan-Belgian Greens at 13, and the Flemish Separatists at 12. There are also 2 semi-Independents.

This leaves an opposition of 45 Flemish and 5 Walooners.


So in short, all French are in the government but not all government are french.

Belgium's new government:

()

A gay, immigrant, francophone socialist takes the oath as Belgian Prime Minister:

()

Good luck, Belgium.

^

You'll need it.

Who is the guy falling asleep in front of Elio di Rupo?

So he's the first socialist and the first francophone in 30 years, then?

That'd be Albert II, King of the Belgians ;)


First Socialist in 37 years, first francophone in 32 (Vanden Boeynants was PM for like 6 months in 1978-79).

Am I continuing this thread? Maybe I'd better, just because it seems far from certain there won't be another election untill 2014.

Today (thursday) the complete public transport sector and some parts of other sectors are on strike against minister Vincent van Quickenborne's plan to reform the pension system and, mainly, against the way van Quickenborne broke with the tradition of social negotiations preceding major reforms. (Van Quickenborne is a bit of a tool, though he's still widely seen as the brain of the new generation of OpenVLD, which says a lot, really.)

The government shouldn't worry about losing votes to the opposition over this, though, as Belgium must be the among the few EU nations where the main opposition party is telling everybody how they think the government's austerity measures aren't going far enough. Sadly the media will probably continue to fail to actually highlight the N-VA fiscal policies. It's just hilarious and very, very disturbing to see the glee which accompanies the use of sentences like 'everybody is going to hurt' or 'we're all going to have to do with a little less' or 'in the government's plans railway personnel would still be able to retire at 60'.

Today for the first time ever a motion of no confidence was introduced in the Flemish Parliament today against minister Philippe Muyters (N-VA), supported by the complete opposition (OVLD, VB, Groen!, LDD). The motion was caused by an e-mail by Muyters' spokesman wich seemed to suggest a disregard for the power of the parliament. While the motion will probably fail, it also caused all of the majority parties to openly rebuke Muyters and probably will mean on the medium term that Muyters' career will be a dead end. (The incident comes after many previous gaffes and miscommunications by him)

This is somewhat interesting because it definitively rules out Muyters from any significant role in what may very well be the most important political event of 2013: the N-VA's seemingly inevitable  leadership election. The party's current leader, the immensely popular Bart De Wever will most likely resign to run for mayor of Antwerp against the SP.a' Patrick Janssens (who's already secured the support of the CD&V in the city). At the very least this would mean De Wever would have to resign if he manages to win. This WILL throw the N-VA in an existential crisis as the party's frontbench is very, ahem, very thin. (To the point where I'm silently convinced that the party is headed for a significant loss in 2014.)

The 2012 municipal elections already will be crucial regardless, as the N-VA will try to win on the one level that will determine whether the party can consolidate its status as Flanders' first party. To do this they will have to uproot (mostly) the CD&V in as many rural communities as possible, while perhaps also scoring some high-profile victories in the more urban area's.  The local level is very important in deciding how many voters a party can tie to itself, so it will be an entertaining race regardless. (I'm entertaining the possibility of a thread in the other board, but maybe it's still a bit too early for that?)

If you're willing to go into some detail, then a thread over at the IE board would be most welcome.

lolfail, I realize noone on here is really dying to find out about the latest bit of political news from the place you drive trough when you have to go from Amsterdam to Paris, but Muyters now really has outdone himself. Today another mail was leaked to the press which contains an explicit reference to Muyters lying to the parliament on the 2009 Budget, followed by a smiley. (like this 'As you may remember minister Muyters lied (:)) in the commision at that date' wtf, wtf, wtf).

This is just borderline hilarious. The guy really has made himself the Rick Perry of Flemish politics. When he became a minister in 2009 I was honestly convinced he was being launched to become De Wever's heir. He had the executive experience, the contacts in the bussinesworld (always important to note that the N-VA is first and foremost a party of corporations), the not-too-nationalist credentials,... and he has thrown all of that away to the point where I'm starting to doubt his survival chances on the no confidence vote next week.

EDIT: All of which begs the question who is going to be the N-VA's next leader. Let's have a brief look at the party's top ranks:

-Geert Bourgeois (Flemish Minister, and basically the party's founder): Last time Bourgeois led the party its ceiling was at 5%. Guy has the electoral appeal of a kitchen sink.
-Jan Jambon (Party 'whip' in the Chamber): Too abrasive, bit of a professional bastard
-Ben Weyts ('Party ideologue'): When about one in two newspaper columns mentioning you refers to you as 'Taliban Ben', you do have a bit of an image problem.
-Frieda Brepoels (MEP): Way too moderate (even slightly 'left' in a typical VU way of being 'left') , I think, also not very charismatic.
-Jan Peumans (President of the Flemish Parliament): The ideal candidate, I think, only 'statesmanlike' figure in the party, but a) too old (looks older than he is and if people I know who know him are to be trusted he's really not all that in shape physically) and b) maybe too moderate. But really, only candidate who I can see as a popular and effective succesor
-Siegfried Bracke: If he's a candidate much amusement will be had. (Let me just say that he has about a hundred mortal flaws).

So that leaves them with the possibility of some relative newcomer trying to claw his or her way up, but the only young politicians with the luggage to do something like that are normally family heirs and the N-VA doesn't have any dynasties (interestingly there is one person who if he had played his cards well troughout the last decade might now conceivably be the heir to the throne of the entire Flemish Movement, Willem-Frederik Schiltz, and he is in parliament for the VLD, lol) 

Other possibility might be some heavyweight crossing over from the public field, but, while this is a bit of a tradition for new ministers and high places on lists, it's unprecedented for the leadership of a major party, I believe.

Anyhow, fun times.

General Strike Today. Seems like we're headed for a period of social unrest.

Today the Chamber of Representatives approved a number of changes to the constitution by a 'comfortable' 103-39 margin. The 6 government parties (PS,SP.a,CD&V,cdH,MR,VLD) were joined by the green parties (Ecolo, Groen!) on the Yes-side. The No-side was made up out of N-VA, LDD, VB and FDF.

This is the first step in the Institutional Reform that was at the centre of the 2007-2011 crisis, and it was achieved by some clever scheming and rule-bending on the government side. Especially contested was the government's temporarily de-activating of the clausule of the constitution (Article 195) that determines that the only way to change an article of the constitution is to have it had listed by the previous parliament. Now, the opposition (N-VA, that is) don't mind the government getting rid of that particular article, but the way they only temporarily put it out of play means a hypothetical future N-VA-led government would not be able to directly touch the constitution. (Unless, of course, the current parliament would kindly list Article 195 for revision once more, which it won't do)

The government dodged, to be very cynical, a makor bullet today. With the national news cycle being dominated as it is by Tuesday's tragic bus crash, the opposition didn't dare to start an offensive and the debate was remarkably quiet. To be absolutely fair, they should have rescheduled the vote.

Honestly, the past week has been one big mess on all counts with at least 4 major stories making sure the papers and television didn't know where to look. We had a firebombing on a Shiite Mosque in Anderlecht (Brussels) leaving an imam dead, directly followed by a 'suicide attack' on the Qatari ambassador's caravan outside of the Royal Palace. Then that crazy Bus crash, and now this (though this is in a different ball park, obviously).

Steven Vanackere (CD&V) is the sort of politician that on paper seems like a future prime minister, yet in practice always is a bit of a disappointment. (Not that that would disqualify him from being PM in the Belgian PR-system).

His tenure as Minister for Foreign Affairs was moderately succesful, yet at times also frustratingly focussed on offending noone. As Finance minister he's harvested good press coverage and he's widely seen as the most important Flemish Minister within the cabinet, which the media sometimes refers to as Di Rupo-Vanackere.

Yet at times he manages to make clear that he'll have a very hard time to ever become a really popular leader figure. Today he's in the news with some quotes on a European Policy Council meeting pointing out the separation of parties along linguistical lines as 'the worst mistake in Belgian history' and pleading for a return to a federal constituency. This may all be true (I'd be tempted to agree), but there's no way it'll ever fly within the CD&V elite.

On the other hand, I severely doubt it would be a problem for the average CD&V voter at all, so it still might prove to not be a big deal, even if it bolsters his 'belgicist' credentials.

So, okay, this thread really just serves for me to vent frustration and little personal observations by now. This means there's no problem with me briefly taking the time to complain about something I suppose most of you will find irrelevant.

One of the traditional events of the Flemish political year is the 'Ijzebedevaart' in late August, which basically is a large outdoor meeting of everyone who's somebody within the Flemish Movement in the shadow of the Ijzermonument in Diksmuide (The Ijzer is the river wich marks the frontline of WWI). It's an opportunity to remember the 'Flemish dead of WWI' and to spew some nationalist rhetoric disguised as 'advice for the political scene'. All of this is very nice and dandy, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, the historical facts that are supposed to lay at the base of the whole event are a little doubtful (No need to go into the boring details of the matter), but if that's what those people need to be happy,...

Recently however the organising comitee decided to move the event to the 11th of November because 2014-18 is approaching. I happen to be of the conviction that Armistice Day should be an entirely politically neutral event and that it is in very poor taste to politicize it in this way. Especially for a political cause that is so hellishly petty and irrelevant as the Ijzerbedevaart's brand of Nationalism. I'm all for the movement exploring its 'pacifist and social-progressive heritage', but this isn't the way to do it.

Beyond that the eyes of the world will be on Ypres and surroundings in November 2014 and I'm not quite sure the obscene way Flemish Nationalists are appearantly going to try to hijack that occasion will reflect well on the rest of us.

Poll from La Libre:

Flanders:

N-VA: 40.1%
SP.a: 13.5%
CD&V: 13.4%
OVLD: 11.5%
VB: 10%
Grn: 7.5%

Brussels:

MR: 23%
PS: 22.3%
Ecolo: 11.9%
FDF: 11.3%
cdH: 8.9%

Wallonia:

PS: 31.4%
MR: 21.1%
cdH: 13.7%
Ecolo: 12.1%
------5%-----
FDF: 1.3%


What can one say?

I saw Bart De Wever on Dutch television last week. I didn't recognize him, his weight loss is amazing, 58 kg.

()

Those are rather flattering pictures. De Wever nowadays almost looks sickly, whereas he used to look a lot more presentable in his robust days. I honestly wonder whether it even is healthy to lose that amount of weight on such a short amount of time.

If the 'after' photo looks like that one (and you say it's a flattering picture, healthwise? I was thinking of commenting on it earlier) then it's almost always a bad sign.