EUROPEAN DIARY:ALMOST 500 days after an inconclusive election, Belgium's long political standoff is drawing to a close. Six-party talks began yesterday on a draft budget for 2012, setting the scene for French-speaking socialist leader Elio Di Rupo to become prime minister whenever the deal is finally done.
They’d want to get a move on. After 16 months of barbed constitutional squabbles, patience is in short supply. Numerous issues still divide the parties. They are trying to trim €10 billion from the budget, a tall order even in calm times. But they are under mounting pressure to quickly reach an accord.
Amid escalating efforts to nail the euro zone debt crisis, domestic politics in Brussels is in the grip of rumour that the country may soon find itself on the receiving end of a credit rating downgrade. Markets are in unforgiving mode. As problems pile up in the local economy, any further prevarication is bound to be punished severely.
There’s been no end of prevarication, of course. The country has been in the charge of a caretaker government since the collapse of the outgoing administration in April last year.
April 2010? Yes. At the time Europe was laid low by the volcanic ash debacle, an episode that has receded into history. Chronic convulsions over Greece have since gone viral, with potentially catastrophic implications for Europe’s single currency and the wider global economy. And still there’s no government in Belgium.
Acting prime minister Yves Leterme wants out: he has already secured a new job in Paris with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Instead, he’s stuck running a slow motion cabinet which has no power to bring forward new legislation. Room for manoeuvre is severely limited. It’s like making a cake without sugar.
The ancient political and linguistic quarrels that bedevil Belgium run very deep.
Simply put, the country’s creaking political system is designed to accommodate two separate communities who share neither language, nor common territory, common political parties or common media. All of this – and an exceptionally high degree of regional autonomy – serves to reinforce difference.
In the Flanders region in the north of the country, they speak Dutch. In Wallonia to the south, they speak French. Their fiscal fortunes are markedly different. Wallonia’s glory was in the heyday of the industrial revolution, when its coal and steel industries magnified its wealth and influence. That’s gone, however. Now the region needs big financial transfers from Flanders, whose economy is more dynamic and entrepreneurial and whose people are wealthier.
Extreme strain between the two communities is nothing new. There have been many bouts of stasis over the decades, raising periodic questions about the viability of the unitary Belgian state.
But the tension boiled over in the June 2011 election, which brought a charismatic pro-independence Flemish nationalist called Bart De Wever to the fore. Known for his blunt rhetoric, he maintains Belgium is a “failed state” which is doomed to disintegration.
For many months, De Wever was involved in fruitless talks on constitutional reform.
At every turn he resisted compromise, riling French-speakers with accusations that they blotted out collaboration with the Nazis during the second World War. He had left the field by the time an agreement was reached and castigated the eventual deal, saying it would leave Flanders with a “very heavy bill”.
He also charged that the three Flemish parties now in budget talks had received nothing from voters but a “right old trashing” in last year’s election. The new government, he said, would be supported by 80 per cent of French-speaking MPs and only 49 per cent of Flemish deputies.
All of this means that Di Rupo has quite a job on his hands if he is to realise his ambition of becoming Belgium’s first French-speaking prime minister since 1979.
Trouble has already surfaced over proposals for a wealth tax, pension reform, tax relief for domestic services such as cleaning and a budget contribution from regional governments to the federal state.
Still, local observers say these “bread-and-butter” hurdles may prove a little easier to surmount than the titanic constitutional questions that held back the first phase of the talks for so long. The argument goes that this is the stuff of everyday politics, whereas constitutional debate is fraught with long-term questions.
What is more, events in the outside world illustrate just how vulnerable Belgium is to the vicissitudes of the crisis. Within the past fortnight, Leterme found himself agreeing to shell out €4 billion for the Belgian unit of the stricken bank Dexia. Hand-wringing by politicians won’t dull that blow.
Time was some Belgians saw an absurdist, funny slant to all this. They are more likely now to raise their eyes in frustration. No less than 492 days have passed since the election. The country needs a government.
