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