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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7654321 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed in China Copyright material – 9781137029607 Contents List of Figures and Tables viii List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xi 1 Why Belgium? 1 Who needs Belgium? 1 Consociational democracy 5 Some kind of federal state 11 Trust and support 12 Plan of the book 15 2 A Short Political History 18 Union and separation of the Low Countries 18 The weight of history 22 1830–1848: Consolidation and ‘unionism’ 26 1848–1893: The social question and the Flemish question 28 1893–1918: The right to vote 32 1918–1945: More consociationalism and territorial division 35 1945–1995: Towards a federal state 38 After 1995: The federation at work 40 Conclusions 41 3 Territorial Organization and Reorganization 45 The steps towards a federal solution 46 The distribution of powers 59 The institutions of the federal state 62 Financing the regions and communities 69 Dealing with conflicts 72 A peculiar federation 74 4 Political Parties 78 The political parties 78 Party organization 102 v Copyright material – 9781137029607 vi Contents Party finance 109 Conclusions 112 5 Voting and Elections 113 The electoral system 113 Election results 128 Substate elections 140 Local elections 142 Conclusions 147 6 The Government 148 The procedure at the federal level 149 The role of the King 154 The procedure at the regional level 156 The mechanics of coalition formation 159 A difficult and lengthy process 168 The functioning of the government 170 The survival of the government 173 Governing at the local level 175 Conclusions 179 7 The Parliament 181 Two houses of the parliament 181 The legislative function 186 Controlling the government 191 The use of language 194 The members of parliament 194 The regional parliaments 199 Conclusions 200 8 Policymaking 201 The political parties again 202 Segmental autonomy or pillarization 204 The social partnership 205 The social security system 209 The economic structure 217 The economic policies of the regions 221 Conclusions 224 Copyright material – 9781137029607 Contents vii 9 Belgium in the World 225 The world in Belgium 225 Belgium big in Africa 228 Belgium in Europe and Europe in Belgium 233 The substate level abroad 237 Between principles and reality 240 Conclusions 241 10 Still Belgium? 242 Two stories 242 Distrust at the top 247 The uneasy consociation 249 New institutions and capacity for decision-making 252 Still Belgium? 256 Bibliography 261 Index 277 Copyright material – 9781137029607 Chapter 1 Why Belgium? Who needs Belgium? In December 2011 Socialist Elio Di Rupo took the oath as the new Prime Minister of Belgium. This was a quite remarkable event. For the first time since 1972 a Walloon, an inhabitant of the southern French-speaking region of Belgium, took charge of the federal government. Elio Di Rupo is the son of Italian immi- grants, making him also the first ‘new Belgian’ to achieve the highest executive position. Most important, however, is the fact that it took no less than 541 days to put together his six-party coalition. This is a world record that is likely to remain unbroken for a while, unless of course Belgium breaks it again. The extremely long process of forming a government that started after the federal elections of June 2010 followed quite a few years of turmoil. After a period of relative stability, during which, between 1991 and 2007, four consecutive governments completely fulfilled their four-year mandate, 2007 marked the beginning of a new period of instability and gridlock and fierce discussions about language, territory and even the very survival of the country. The formation of a federal coalition after the elec- tions of June 2007 took had taken 194 days and the government sworn in at the end of 2007 was only a transition cabinet, replaced by a new one in March 2008. Allegations that Prime Minister Leterme had interfered in a law case questioning the way in which the Fortis Bank had been dismantled to avoid bankruptcy forced him to resign in December 2008. He was replaced by Herman Van Rompuy, who handed the position back to Leterme when he was called to become the first president of the European Council in November 2009. But Leterme’s government fell apart in April 2010 after failing to find a solu- tion for the decades-old discussion about the boundaries of the Brussels electoral district. The early elections of June 2010 produced a quite spectacular result. The largest party of the 1 Copyright material – 9781137029607 2 The Politics of Belgium country was now the Flemish nationalist N-VA (Nieuw-Vlaamse Allantie), defending a thorough reorganization of the Belgian federal system into a loose confederation and, in the longer run, into full independence for Flanders. Attempts to form a coalition uniting the Francophone Socialist Party of Di Rupo and the N- VA of Bart De Wever proved extremely difficult. One even wondered whether a federal cabinet would ever be formed and whether Belgium would be able to survive as a country. Newspapers and discussion programmes on radio and television kept voicing strong opinions about the future of Belgium, rang- ing from splitting it up between France and the Netherlands, over the creation of an independent Flanders and a smaller Belgium composed of Wallonia and Brussels, to the fierce and emotional defence of the survival of the country. Voices defend- ing a final post-Belgium solution were stronger in Flanders; voices defending Belgium were stronger in the south and in Brus- sels. The idea of splitting the country was often referred to as Plan B, Plan A being the formation of a government. This was not the first time that existential debates about the very nature of the country had dominated the agenda. The 1970s and 1980s had already been rather difficult, eventually resulting in the transformation of a unitary Belgium into a federal state built on the language communities (and on their disagreement on internal boundaries and on the status of Brussels). Since 1995 Belgium has indeed been a federal state, and for a while that seemed to reduce the intensity of the conflict. But it came back full force. During these years of renewed tensions between the language groups in Belgium, the international press paid more attention than usual to Belgian politics. Many suggested that it might be time for Belgium to call it a day, to end the suffering and to split the country up. ‘Who needs Belgium?’ asked The Economist. This question is not easy to answer. But that is probably the case for most countries in the world. They happen to be on the map as a result of events and decisions that might possibly have been different but which define their very existence. In this chapter and throughout this book we will explain how and why Belgium is quite an interesting country. Obviously it is not its size that makes Belgium remarkable. It is indeed a small country, covering only 32,500 square kilometres and with 11 million inhabitants, hardly more than the population Copyright material – 9781137029607 Why Belgium? 3 of metropolitan Paris or Greater London. It holds 22 of the 736 seats in the European Parliament, or less than 3 per cent of the total number. Yet in the context of the European Union (EU) Belgium is more than just a small country. One could almost say that Belgium’s capital city, Brussels, simply is the EU. Brussels is where important political meetings are organized. Brussels is where the Commission has its headquarters. And Belgian politi- cians are quite visible in the EU, although they have also some- times missed a few opportunities to become really big in Europe. Former Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene had strongly impressed his colleagues with the way in which he had chaired the EU in 1993. He was a man who could succeed Jacques Delors as the president of the Commission.