That also means formateur Elio Di Rupo doesn’t have to be so diplomatic anymore. He seems a rather calm and patient man – indeed, such qualities were a prerequisite for making any progress towards resolving this intra-community stalemate – but even he couldn’t resist recently telling Flemish television – as picked up by the newspaper De Standaard – who he feels really got in the way of his work and made it take sooooooo long. No surprises: it was the Flemish N-VA party headed by Bart De Wever, a party whose stated goal is the eventual (and peaceful, and gradual) secession of Flanders from Belgium. Di Rupo claims to have gotten “zero results” out of De Wever during the long course of negotiations.

He also disputed De Wever’s claim that the new governmental accord serves to harm Flemish interests. After all, the other Flemish political parties* signed up to it. Surely four out of five parties cannot be wrong!

* If you’re interested, they are: Open VLD, SP.A, CD&V and Groen! Note that all punctuation, including Groen!’s exclamation-mark, is as found in the original name.

                          

You might have a recollection of that somewhere in the back of your mind (unless you yourself are Belgian, in which case the memory is a bit more prominent). Yet why should anyone really care – unless, of course, they are Belgian? Maybe not even then: the country seems to run fairly well even without a formal national government in place and, indeed, currently carries out the duties of the rotating EU presidency. There’s really no threat of any sort of violence, despite the current high levels of frustration within the Belgian political establishment.

One reason is the enormous Belgian national debt, since one of the points of forming a proper government is to come up with a team willing to take on the responsibility of making sure it gets paid back, in the right amounts and on time. But a simpler reason may simply be fascination – of the pileup-on-the-highway sort – with the sloppy, sordid mess that the government-forming process has become over these long six months (so far).

Take the latest sensation, namely the interview given two weeks ago to Der Spiegel by Bart De Wever, head of the N-VA party that is the largest in Flanders (Belgium’s northern, Dutch-speaking part) mainly by virtue of its strong separatist tendencies. “Strong” I say, but apparently not “overwhelming” in that for much of the past six months (if not now) De Wever has consented to appointment by the King as bemiddelaar, i.e. the politician officially designated to try to form a new government. As the authoritative Flemish paper De Standaard points out today, however, the venting De Wever delivered to Der Spiegel clearly shows he is about out of patience with the whole charade:

If it were possible to set the necessary reforms in one Belgian state on track, I wouldn’t stand in the way. But that is not possible. The Walloons [i.e. the French Belgians], above all the Socialists as their strongest [political] party, are blocking all meaningful reforms.

And that is hardly all. The interview is entitled “The sick man of Europe” (Europas kranker Mann), an epithet applied by De Wever himself (along with een mislukt land, “a failure of a land”) to the country in which he is an elected politician, one which for that matter he is sure “has no more long-range future.”

Since it’s apparent he operates under the assumption that no one in the French-speaking half of Belgium has bothered to take up the German language, De Wever goes freely on to reveal other tasty tidbits. Like he expects his N-VA party to be voted out of power in Flanders in the next election if it does in fact ever enter any new national government – because N-VA voters clearly never voted for that, but rather for some sort of intelligent separation process! Like he doesn’t feel he can trust King Albert II, since his sympathies so obviously lie on the side of the Walloons.

But it turns out that politicians from Wallonia actually are able to access German texts one way or another. Newscasts from Belgian radio today (yes, including those in Dutch) are crackling with their indignant French-speaking voices pointing out – with justification – how all this “hopeless” talk is about the last thing Belgian state finances need now that international bond speculators are starting to shift their jaundiced eyes from Greece, Ireland, etc. to pick out other possible sovereign-debt deadbeats.

Oh, and they also point out how outright rude De Wever is, considering the recent government-forming efforts by the current bemiddelaar, Johan Vande Lanotte – another Flemish politician, with the sort of funky Dutch/French name you can only find in Belgium, but from a different party – seem to be coming along so well. Yeah . . . right.

(BTW De Standaard also includes a link to De Wever’s Der Spiegel interview itself, and in a Dutch translation – not only because of its Dutch audience, but also since anyone who wants to read it in the original German needs an on-line subscription to access it behind Der Spiegel’s paywall!)

UPDATE: Sure enough, now we have this entry on the FT’s Alphaville blog reporting how S&P has shifted its outlook on Belgium’s sovereign debt from “stable” to “negative,” namely for the unusual reason of “political uncertainty,” i.e. no government. It further threatens a downgrade to the country’s AA+ rating if there’s no such proper government in place within six months – or if that “proper” government nonetheless seems to be ineffective in addressing the state’s worsening fiscal issues.

                          

“Alright, but isn’t this the same country where no one wants to serve as prime minister?” you might be asking at this point, particularly if you followed along with coverage on this weblog last summer of yet another Belgian political crisis that unfortunately coincided with the National Holiday. And, of course, you’re right. So it is no surprise – even if it is kind of amusing – to see on the website of that very same newspaper, De Standaard, on the very same day a headline in English, “Something is rotten in the state of Belgium.” That fronts an article that is all about Belgian politician Bart De Wever and his dominant (in the Dutch-speaking part of the country, that is) N-VA or Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie party. De Wever tells reporter Peter De Lobel that 2008 was for his party “the year of the great disillusionment.” He laments that “this country doesn’t work any more,” and points out that the major Belgian bank KBC had to get a €2 billion bailout from the Flemish regional government a few weeks to avoid bankruptcy – the Belgian federal government was supposedly uninterested in helping out what De Wever claims it looked askance at as a “Flemish and Catholic” bank.

That sort of squabbling over a major financial institution in trouble is a measure for you of how divided politics are in contemporary Belgium, no matter how “globalized” the country may be.

                          

When last we left portly, avuncular old King Albert II, he had received Prime Minister Yves Leterme’s resignation but had yet to decide whether to accept it. In fact, he did not, but what he did do was appoint three “mediators” with assignment of working out some way to breakthrough the current government deadlock. The fundamental problem is that the political representatives from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country, of whom Leterme is currently the leading representative, are not willing to let things go on without some concessions from the other half of the country, French-speaking Wallonia, which would increase the former’s and reduce the latter’s influence over the national government, especially concerning what federal tax monies are spent on (of which the Flemings contribute the larger share). And interestingly, the three “mediators” King Albert appointed have nary a Fleming among them: they are two politicians from Wallonia (François-Xavier de Donnea, Raymond Langendries) and one from the tiny German-speaking part of the country (Karl-Heinz Lambertz).

They might have been handed something very close to a “Mission: Impossible” if the analysis from “V.R.” in today’s La Libre Belgique is anything to go by (Ten Days to Get Out of the Impasse). The deadline to accomplish something seems to be 31 July, but who set that deadline? The King? Well yes, in a way, in that that is the day the King wants to see some sort of preliminary report from the three. But it was Bart De Wever, head of the somewhat militant Flemish political party Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA), who set a more seriously deadline by announcing on Friday that he expected to see some concessions from the French side by that 31 July date on the subject of reforming the Belgian State along the lines his party desires (as summarized above). De Wever can throw his weight around like that, you see, because his N-VA is a large part of the coalition with the more moderate Flemish party of Yves Leterme (the Christen-Democratisch en Vlaams, or CD&V) – and with three parties from the French side – that forms the present Belgian federal government. It’s the existence of that coalition that enabled the King to reject Leterme’s resignation in the first place, in effect saying “No, you go back to your coalition and resume governing the country.” If/when the N-VA leaves the coalition, then it no longer commands a majority in the federal parliament and some other Prime Minister has to be found who can put together a coalition that does – the King certainly does not have the power to appoint as Prime Minister anyone he pleases, only one that has that kind of support in parliament, because after all Belgium is a parliamentary democracy. (Yes, a prime minister can be appointed from a minority coalition, but of course only then with additional guarantees from outside-the-government parties that they will not vote to topple it in vote-of-no-confidence – in the present situation, basically tantamount to having to have a majority coalition behind you.)

Leterme The Only Choice

At this point I finally realize how naïve I was in my previous entry over Belgium’s latest crisis, when I concluded that the King would not reject Leterme’s resignation because “that’s really not the sort of thing you do.” In fact, that was likely the only thing the King could do here because, with Leterme gone, there was really no one else Albert II could think of who would be both willing and able (defined as being able to command a majority coalition) to replace him as head of government. Of course you keep the guy who is already there, otherwise Belgium is plunged again into a chaotic and annoying situation in which there is no government, there is no prospect of a government, and while everyone argues about what should be done there is no duly-constituted national authority in place to make the policy decisions that need to be made about affairs both inside and outside the country. Belgium has already faced that situation too many times in the recent past – generally, after every recent national election, including most especially the nine months of this exquisite sort of political purgatory after the latest such elections in June, 2007.

So Albert II avoids that for now by telling Leterme to get back to work – but the point of that July 31 deadline from the N-VA is that the N-VA will start getting what it wants politically or else it will withdraw from the coalition then, so that Leterme cannot be Prime Minister anymore, and so plunge the country once again into this purgatory. Really, imagine that sort of thing happening in your own country: no national government, and nobody able to say when there will be a national government or who it will be. It’s really something that’s barely tolerable, and the important thing is that, each time it happens, everyone gets that much more exasperated with the present system. Belgium happens to be a very federal country already, with substantial powers and responsibilities handed over to the regional governments who never have crises of this sort, for the simple reason that the regions more-or-less correspond to the separate cultural/linguistic areas. So the answer that becomes more and more obvious to the electorate is to do away with this national government that seems to be always paralyzed – do away with the nation – and proceed with only the regional governments. (But then there remains the question of who takes charge of the notable island of prosperity, tax-revenue, and EU institutions that is Brussels: a French-speaking island – but not by much – surrounded by Dutch-speaking Flanders . . .)

Rainy, Gloomy Celebration

Anyway, it was 21 July yesterday so the show had to go on with the usual festivities. Appropriately, though – just so that no one would forget themselves or the situation and get into too festive a mood – yesterday was also a very rainy Monday, coming after quite a rainy weekend, and De Standaard reported that, temperature-wise, it was one of the coldest July days of the last hundred years. Still, Brussels Celebrated Despite the Political Crisis. The royal family attended the traditional Te Deum Mass at the Brussels cathedral, accompanied by Yves Leterme who slipped into the cathedral by a side door. Naturally, the cardinal president at the service preached for mutual understanding in his sermon. Then, despite the rain, the customary military parade took place in front of the Royal Palace, starting at 4:00 PM. In addition to Army soldiers and vehicles, representatives from the police also took part in the parade; De Standaard notes their particularly notable demonstration of riot control personnel and equipment. And King Albert gave his National Day speech: “In our land we must think of new forms of society.”

Meanwhile, as his own contribution to National Day, the mayor of Antwerp, Patrick Janssens, noted that Belgium was reverting to where it was back in the beginning in the 19th century, when only Finance, Justice, Interior and Foreign Affairs were competences handled at the national level, everything else was in the hands of the regions. (French-language reporting in Le Soir here, to give a bit of balance.) It’s not sure whether he thought that a good thing. But the Gazet van Antwerpen issued the results of its own poll, which indicated that 33.7% of the Flemish people would like to unite Flanders with the Netherlands. (The respondents had some funny ideas about how that would happen, perhaps reflecting their over-estimation of the hand they would hold in negotiations to bring that about. Name of the new country? How about “Vlaanderenland” or “Nedervlaanderen,” although “Nederlanden” would probably be best – cf. the current “Nederland” as the Dutch name for the Netherlands. Capital? Amsterdam, or maybe Antwerp. Head of state? Preferably no royal family; if there has to be one, then let it be the House of Orange, i.e. the Dutch Royal Family, certainly not the Belgian Royal Family. Etc.) On the other hand, a collective of “progressive Flemish intellectuals” marked the National Day by releasing a manifesto (“The Flanders That We Want,” printed here in the French-language paper La Libre Belgique) in which they regretted that political interests in the 21st century still seem to have to be based upon regional and language interests, denounced the long-standing demands from the Flemish political parties for a “re-balancing” of the federal government more in favor of Flanders, and called for a new political order in Belgium.