EU Diary: It's playtime at De Plataan primary school in Merchtem, a small town about a 20-minute drive from Brussels. A class of 11-year-olds are steering their bicycles around an obstacle course while some younger children are singing a song in Dutch in the playground.
All seems normal. But in recent weeks this school, the mayor, and the town council have been catapulted into the media spotlight. The authorities have been accused of inflaming tensions between Walloons and Flemish people by banning French speaking on the grounds of all public schools.
The ban follows a recent comment by a minister in the Flemish government that French speakers were "too foolish to learn Dutch", and is deepening the linguistic and cultural divisions in Belgium ahead of local elections on October 8th.
"The council regulation says that children and parents must speak Dutch when they are in the playground or at school. It is about integration, not discrimination," says Merchtem's mayor, Eddie De Block, who claims he isn't simply playing electoral politics.
Merchtem is in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium that has a population of about six million people. But its close proximity to Brussels, where the majority of people speak French, makes it an increasingly popular location for French-speaking families eager to buy housing in a greener and more pleasant environment. The Francophone drift to the Dutch-speaking commuter belt, however, is raising fears among locals.
"Merchtem is a small community and 60 per cent of the people who come here now are speaking French . . . we want to address it before it becomes a real problem and you have a fifth of the students in schools French speakers," says de Block, who will stand in his third local election next month.
The regional elections come at a time of escalating tension between Flanders and Wallonia, with Flemish parties threatening to pull out of Belgium's federal government next year unless they are given wider powers. It will also see the Flemish extreme-right party Vlaams Belang, which has about 25 per cent support, trying to take control of town councils and enter government in Flanders for the first time.
Merchtem's ban has also exacerbated tensions in neighbouring Wallonia, where hardline parties, particularly the Front Démocratique des Francophones, have seized on it to help their own election campaign. It is also unpopular among some French speakers in Merchtem, who see it as part of a widening policy of discrimination.
"It is not fair - children should be allowed to speak any language in the playground when they talk to their friends," says Sandy Virn Wemmel, who has a six-year-old at a school in Merchtem. "My husband is a French speaker and doesn't speak Dutch."
The Merchtem council also recently passed a controversial regulation forcing all market stalls in the town to post signage in Dutch. This was part of a policy to protect the Flemish community, says De Block, who notes that signs in Arabic at a local meat stall could have said anything, even "vote for al-Qaeda".
De Block's pro-Dutch policies strike a chord among many local Dutch speakers. Marie-Jane, who lives 10km out of town and visits Merchtem on market days, accuses French speakers who move to Flanders of not making an effort to learn Dutch.
"If they want to come and live here they should speak Dutch and integrate. It would be the same if we went to England. We would learn the language."
The council's ban on speaking French at school is unlikely to cause any practical problems for students at De Plataan, says school principal Luc Willocx. In practice, the school had prohibited pupils from speaking French some time ago and last year parents were already told to bring interpreters to parent/teacher meetings.
"About 13 per cent of the 400 pupils now do not speak Dutch as a first language . . . there were just one or two when I started in 1983," says Willocx.
The media furore over the ban fits a pattern of escalating disputes between the two linguistic and cultural traditions since the 1970s, says Rudi Janssens, sociologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Brussels.
However, banning second languages at French or Dutch schools is not unusual in multilingual Belgium, he says. "But it is usually presented as a pedagogical issue . . . now it is at a political level because it was ordered by the town council rather than by the schools." he says.