`Chickengate' final straw that breaks Belgian political logjam

The alphabet soup that is Belgian politics was last weekend stirred with a vigour that has brought consternation to those few reporters here who thought they had just about mastered it. No country this for political dyslexics.

One thing is clear, however, the old stranglehold of Belgium's traditional Social Christians has been broken and their Flemish leader and Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, is looking for another job (NATO secretary-general?).

The political tradition, strongest in the Flemish north, which in the 1950s could secure 48 per cent of the national vote and had been in long-term decline, can now barely make 21 per cent.

The Liberals, for long in third place, edged ahead of the Socialists, but by far the biggest winners are the Greens, breaking out of the world of fringe politics into the mainstream and almost certainly a government role. Louis Michel is doing the rounds of fellow party leaders. The leader of the Francophone Liberals has been asked by King Albert II to play the traditional role of informateur, or power-broker between Belgium's many parties, to see if a new government coalition can be put together.

The Liberals' success means it is likely their nominee will be the next prime minister. That privilege will go to a politician from the Flemish majority community, probably Michel's Flemish counterpart, Guy Verhofstadt.

But Verhofstadt, despised on the left as a "Thatcherite", may prove to be unpalatable to potential coalition partners, with one of his party colleagues, a star of the Dutroux parliamentary inquiry, Marc Verwhilghen, seen as an alternative. The most likely government formation in the federal parliament is a six-party alliance between the Liberals, Socialists and Greens, each party mirrored in its Francophone and Flemish form - respectively, for the Liberals PRLFDF-MCC and VLD; Socialists, PS and SP; and Greens, Ecolo and Agalev.

Although, technically, once the numerical balance between the two communities is maintained in the cabinet, an "asymmetrical" coalition involving different forces in each community is possible but regarded as very unlikely.

(In fact, as astute observers will have noticed, eight parties could be involved because the Francophone Liberals are an alliance of three parties, but for the sake of simplicity . . . )

Critically, the result of the elections now means that at least three of the major political families will have to get together at national level to secure a majority - a Liberal-Socialist-Green coalition, putting the Social Christians out to grass, would have 90 votes, well clear of the 76 majority. The badly-mauled Socialists cannot really afford to contemplate a coalition without the Greens - they simply can't risk going back into government if the Greens, as the saying goes, are outside the tent pissing in. Embrace them in a broader coalition, give then a taste of power, and compromise them with the realities of having to take unpopular decisions . . . or so the Socialist logic goes.

A Socialist-Liberal-Green government would also make it easier for the majority of Liberals to justify doing a deal with the Socialists, whom they berated during the elections and whose closeness to vested industrial and bureaucratic interests they have promised to tackle. But the right of the party will be very uneasy about the prospects of an alliance with the "irresponsible" Greens.

The hostility is mutual among rank-and-file Greens, who see the Liberals as the incarnation of the growth-at-all-costs mentality they despise. Yet what could make such a coalition palatable to the Flemish wing of the Greens, Agalev, is the exclusion of the Social Christians, held largely responsible by them for the escalation of the dioxin crisis because of their links to the powerful farm lobby, the Boeren bond. And the negotiations which take place at national level are also being reproduced in one form or another throughout the complex array of assemblies that make up the heavily devolved Belgian federal state.

There are the assemblies of the regions, Wallonia, Flanders, Brussels, and of the linguistic communities. In the latter case the Flemish regional and community assembly, the Vlaams Gemeenschap, doubles up in the two roles. The small German-speaking community in the east also has its own assembly.

In Brussels, continuity of the current Liberal-Socialist administration with an attempt to bring the Greens on board, while in Flanders a four-party alliance involving moderate Flemish nationalists, Volksunie, is likely.

Yet why has it all taken so long to break the logjam? Why not in 1995, when the corruption of the political system, and particularly the Socialists had been so vividly exposed by the Agusta bribes scandal - they had accepted major "donations" in return for military contracts. Then the Socialist and Christian Social votes barely blinked and the governing coalition blithely sailed on to its 12-year term.

Perhaps not then because the only people surprised by the revelations were the foreigners living here - every Belgian knew exactly how the system worked, and although they may not have liked it very much, were resigned to its continuation.

The Dutroux missing children affair was fundamentally different. For the first time the public was confronted in an intensely personal and direct way with the costs of a system based on patronage and petty, and not so petty, corruption from top to bottom, a system in which the entrenched power of the parties in all facets of life turned uncontrolled, inefficient fiefdoms of the bureaucracy into rivals. Police against police, prosecutors against judiciary. And paedophiles walk free.

"Chickengate" was the final straw.