Since December 6th, after almost two years of bickering, Belgium has a fully operational government again. We now hold the sorry world record for having the longest government formation in history. Iraq held the record with its shaky coalition after 289 days of negotiations, and we “improved” that record to a whopping 541 days.
The Elections of 2010 for a new federal government came after the last coalition had fallen over a conflict between the Dutch speaking and the French speaking sides. The elections were won by the socialists on the French side and by the nationalists on the Dutch side, the NVA. Belgium holds a fair number of different political parties, but these two are particularly not fond of one another. So the two parties, who had been lambasting each other during their respective campaigns, started negotiations to form a coalition. They focused their attention on constitutional reform first. Since that requires a two thirds majority in Parliament, the negotiations were done between the two winning parties and five more parties. Not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. The king appointed a guy from one side to lead the negotiations, and his proposals were met with a strong ‘never!’ after which the king appointed a guy from the other side whose proposals were equally unwelcome.
This went on for a while until somebody got the idea of adding two more political parties to the negotiations. One of these, the MR, was a coalition of smaller parties among which the FDF, the French nationalists, basically the opposite of the NVA on the language spectrum. No one was surprised to see the little goodwill there was further evaporate, until the NVA finally left the negotiations. Not much longer the FDF left the table, thereby removing both extremes. It was like fresh air to the negotiators: suddenly they closed one deal after another. About time too: the coalition of running affairs had stretched its authority to the limit, the EU demanded a 2012 budget approved by the new Parliament, and the markets were getting twitchy. Trhoughout the process of negotiations, the scenario of a split of the country had surfaced and resurfaced regularly. Finally, on December 6th the new coalition took the oath and was given the confidence by Parliament a couple of days later. The coalition agreement holds fundamental constitutional reforms with more autonomy for the regions, and painful austerity measures. But the work is only starting: now the agreement needs to be translated into laws and acts in Parliament, where it faces opposition by several parties who participated in the talks at some point. If the dissolving coalition and the ensuiing sectarian violence of former record holder Iraq is any reference, we are not out of the woods yet.
Nevertheless: most everybody is happy about the end of the political instability. The new prime minister has added a lot of first’s to his title: the first French speaking PM in a while, the first openly gay politician on this level and the first prime minister with foreign roots – he comes from a poor Italian family. Taking 541 days to form a coalition might be something not to be proud of, but history is packed with examples where negotiators left the table only to pick up arms. In Belgium people just celebrated the new record with a bag of fries…
