For those of you following the situation in Belgium, there is news. Is it good news? Maybe. Is it bad news? Maybe. That is not yet clear. And it won’t be clear for at least another year.
We have a government! Or rather, we have an agreement about a government! The government will have a 2/3 majority in the chamber of representatives and will be led by Guy Verhofstadt, at the moment caretaker prime minister. Verhofstadt is a charismatic and intelligent man, who is one of the few great politicians trusted in all of Belgium, altough he is Flemish and his party, Open VLD, officially favors confederalism. But we don’t have an agreement about a normal sort of government, but about an interim-government.
Around easter Guy Verhofstadt will leave and Yves Leterme, the twice-failed Christian Democrat premier preferitus, will take over. The power balance within the government will not be changed, and Yves Leterme will be vice-premier untill easter, so the question is why this is an interim-government.
We might as well call it a government that will replace its leader after a few months, as agreed. But that is all part of the plan. By naming it differently, the political parties can now tell their voters that this is just to stop the crisis. (There is no crisis, of course, but still) And one of the popular Walloon parties (the PS, socialists) who lost the election, will join the government, something nobody could have foreseen right after the election when they themselves claimed to favor a role in the opposition.
This gives the interim government enough votes for constitutional changes. One thing that will definatly be solved is BHV. The constitutional court has decided that as long as that is not solved, elections are not constitutional, and thus cannot take place.But Yves Leterme wants a lot more. His party made its major comeback in june after 8 years of wandering trough the desert, by aligning themselves with a Flemish nationalist party and pleading for greater souvereignty for Flanders. (and by default, also for Wallonia) Will he get it? I doubt it. The Walloon parties consider greater autonomy to be part of a plot to slowly dissolve Belgium. They will not have much choice about BHV, but it is unlikely they will want to go any further.
Yves Leterme takes over around easter. That means he has about one year untill there are European and Flemish elections in 2009. I predict that the federal government will fall in 2009 and that they will be forced to hold federal elections on the same date as the European and Flemish ones, wich is a very common theory. And the end result will be a re-shuffling of the cards by the voter, who may punish the ones who won in June for not being able to form a government.
