FOR THOSE managing any organisation, the return from summer holidays is always a disconcerting experience. Having let go of the tiller for a few weeks, relief that the ship is still afloat and safely on course is tempered by a nagging, depressing sense that one is not, after all, indispensable.
As a long-awaited political breakthrough now raises the prospect that Belgium may soon have a government, its political class may well also have cause to reflect ruefully on its own dispensability. Since June last year, 460 days, the country has been steered competently and steadily away from rocks by a caretaker government, although markets and ratings agencies have become increasingly jittery about delays in implementing structural reform in the heavily indebted country. Belgium’s debt-to-GDP ratio in 2010 was behind only Greece and Italy in the euro zone, and on a par with Ireland.
But there’s many a slip between cup and lip. The agreement between eight parties from both communities announced late Wednesday night by lead negotiator and prospective prime minister, the Francophone Socialist Elio di Rupo, has achieved a breakthrough on the particularly vexed, and previously government-breaking, issue of Francophone voting rights in Brussels. The deal was described by one commentator as “a miracle”.Talks will now continue on the scarcely less fraught issues of the state financing law, the transfer of power from the federal level to the regions, and then a programme for government. Di Rupo was confident yesterday, however, that the camel’s back has been broken though coalition formation may still take weeks.
At stake is the perennial demand of the majority Flemish community for greater regional autonomy over fiscal matters – and hence a greater share of the national cake – while the Francophone community bridles at what it sees as a scarcely veiled partitionist agenda.
The political logjam is guaranteed by provisions, like those in the Northern Ireland Assembly, which require governments to be artificial coalitions of parties representing majorities in each community, and which reward and promote sectarian and separatist politics. In last year’s election the success story in Flanders was that of Bart de Wever of the militantly nationalist New Flemish Alliance. Now, even though excluded by the eight parties in the coalition-building process, his irredentist shadow haunts it and sets the agenda. Belgium may remain intact and may be edging towards a government. But only just.