Belgium (finally) forms government

[wautd]

Link

BRUSSELS—Belgium's new cabinet will be sworn in by King Albert II on Tuesday, the royal palace said, ending a world-record 541 days without a federal government for the heavily indebted euro-zone country.

Elio Di Rupo will become the divided nation's first Francophone premier in 32 years, taking office in a Europe dominated by center-right governments in time for a European summit at the end of this week.

The palace said Mr. Di Rupo, who led the negotiations that broke the stalemate, presented the king with the names of ministers, who will be sworn in on Tuesday.

There are six parties in the ruling coalition, the result of 18 months of tense negotiations and a major state overhaul, and there must also be a vote of confidence in parliament in coming days so that Mr. Di Rupo can attend the European Union summit meeting here on Thursday and Friday.

Steven Vanackere, a Flemish Christian Democrat, will become finance minister, swapping jobs with Didier Reynders, who has been in the role since 1999. He must tackle euro-member Belgium's high level of state debt—just below 100% of gross domestic product—and restore confidence after a downgrade of its sovereign debt by Standard and Poor's 10 days ago.

A French-speaking centrist liberal, Mr. Reynders takes over as foreign and EU affairs minister. Melchior Wathelet becomes secretary of state with responsibility for energy, including the contentious "rente nucleaire," a levy paid by GDF-Suez SA for keeping Belgium's nuclear reactors open.

Mr. Di Rupo has said the government will draw up a policy on the closure of Belgium's nuclear reactors within six months of taking power.

"My first words are for the citizens," Mr. Di Rupo said last week, as he set out the new government's plans, including public-sector cuts and new taxes. "I want to thank them for their patience.…Together, we need to roll up our sleeves and get this country out of crisis."

Mr. Di Rupo, 60 years old, is head of the French-speaking Socialist Party of Belgium and mayor of the southern city of Mons.

He mediated an agreement among six parties for a coalition government and major state overhauls as Europe's debt crisis appeared to be drawing in Belgium, resolving a deadlock that had lasted since elections in June 2010.

The former chemistry professor, who is known for wearing a red bow tie, rose to power from a very poor immigrant background, with his appointment described as "the American dream, in Belgium.…He's someone who had to work very hard," by Vincent van Quickenborne, a political opponent from the Flemish liberal party, in newspaper Le Soir.

Born in 1951 in Morlanwelz in the southern region of Wallonia, Mr. Di Rupo was one of seven children in a family of Italian immigrants.

After his father was killed in an accident, his illiterate mother was forced to place some of the children in an orphanage, he said in a 2008 interview with journalist Francis de Woestyn in 2008.

The new prime minister faces numerous challenges. He has to trim public spending in line with European Union targets to get a balanced budget by 2015, without alienating his party's core support from trade unions.

He takes power as part of a diverse coalition that doesn't include the N-VA Flemish nationalist party, which won the most votes in richer, more populous Flanders.

Mr. Di Rupo, the first French-speaking premier since 1979, is often mocked for his shaky command of Dutch.

When he heads to the EU summit, he will be one of the few left-wingers at the table in a Europe where center-right governments, led by neighboring France and Germany, are steering the Continent's course.

He is also the first openly gay EU leader, having announced his orientation in 1997 when questioned by journalists.

Belgium has undergone one of its deepest political crises since World War II, with politicians from every language group and political party heading talks before Mr. Di Rupo found consensus on the wide-ranging state overhauls that led to a breakthrough in negotiations.

He will be working under time pressure: The country's voters return to the polls in just two years.

18 months to form a government. Better luck next time, Iraq

The country's voters return to the polls in just two years.

Yeah, that’ll end well when this government represents the majority of the minority.
I’d be surprised if this government survives as long as it took to make.

[wautd]

a bit more informative article

Eurozone crisis forces Belgium to finally form a governmentEurozone crisis forces Belgian politicians to act and form a coalition with French-speaking Elio Di Rupo at the helm

Students tried stripping to their underwear and handing out free chips; giant lions and roosters snogged in the street; the country's leading actor ordered all men to go on shaving strike; and a woman senator said politicians' wives should deny them sex.

But in the end, it took a looming financial meltdown in the eurozone to force Belgium's absurdly divided and squabbling political class to form a government.

After breaking the modern-day world record for failing to form a government – making war-torn Iraq look like amateurs – Belgium has surmounted the linguistic and cultural stand-off that threatened to wipe it from the map, and agreed to form a coalition in the name of sorting out its finances.

After 535 days without a proper leader – the country has been led by a transitional caretaker government – Belgian officials said there was now likely to be a coalition cabinet in place next week.

But the crisis has left divisions more deeply entrenched than ever between the rich, Dutch-speaking north and poorer, French-speaking south, with melting pot Brussels marooned in the middle.

More than 80 rounds of negotiations came to nothing but in the end Belgian politicians had no choice after Standard & Poor's downgraded its credit rating and borrowing stood as high as the country's GDP, with its banking sector seriously shaken.

Yet the birthplace of René Magritte, and spiritual home of surrealism, might not yet have finished with the absurd political crisis. The 180-year-old country once described as an accident of history might have averted a split, but the linguistic iron curtain remains in place.

During the year-and-a-half-long crisis, relentless stereotyping was in abundance, deepening the divide, with Flemings, who make up 60% of the 10.5 million population, described as a bunch of tetchy, right-wing nationalist extremists, and Francophones as work-shy scroungers.

A tentative coalition of six parties of very different political hues now faces the minefield of putting in place severe austerity measures, tax changes and cuts, which are bound to spark social unrest, with strikes already planned on the streets of Brussels.

No easier task is the plan to reform the very essence of the way politics in divided Belgium are run.

Conspicuously absent from the coalition is Belgium's biggest single political party, the right-wing, separatist Flemish N-VA, led by Bart De Wever, whose electoral triumph last year helped cement the deadlock. His major political platform was to dissolve Belgium and split Flanders from French-speaking Wallonia. This hasn't happened and De Wever is now shouting from the sidelines.

Meanwhile, the ruling coalition will be led by the colourful, bow-tie wearing and perpetually smiling figure, Elio Di Rupo. At 60, he will be Belgium's first French-speaking prime minister in 30 years, a rare centre-left voice in a European Union that has veered right, and one of few proudly gay world leaders. He's also the first Socialist to take the premiership in Belgium since 1974.

But he speaks poor Dutch. This is a serious problem in a country where language is so important and so fiercely protected that, in areas of Dutch-speaking Flanders, town council meetings can find their decisions annulled if anyone is heard to utter a word of French.

The biggest Flanders daily, Het Laatste Nieuws, has slammed Di Rupo's dire pronunciation and syntax. He has promised to improve. But the failing is not lost on the Flemish separatist De Wever, who said: "My Nigerian-origin cleaning lady who has been in Belgium for two years speaks better Dutch than Elio. In Brussels you can't sell a handbag without being bilingual, yet you can become prime minister without speaking proper Dutch."

Political observers said they believed the coalition federal government could hold, but that Belgium now faced major cuts and reforms ranging from pensions to taxes and unemployment benefits, which could upset unions and business leaders alike. The absurd political stalemate has also left its scars.

Pascal Delwit, professor in political science at the Free University of Brussels, said: "Belgium is the capital of surrealism, and this long political crisis was typically surrealist, accompanied by a kind of general calm among citizens. When there was a hung parliament in 2010 in the UK, after six days people were saying 'what's happening?'. Here it lasted more than 530 days, with no mass movement in the streets, a calm pragmatic population that accepted the surrealist elements."

But he said the divide between the two main linguistic communities – around 75,000 Belgians speak German – had deepened during the stalemate: "The crisis and insults have made it worse. The idea of Belgium breaking up and separating was repeated so much it became a more accepted idea. And we saw repeatedly how French-speakers see Dutch-speakers as arrogant proto-fascists and Francophones are seen as lazy people who refuse to work. Yet what we've now shown is that Dutch-speakers and French-speakers from left and right could agree on a difficult budget. It's as if Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour formed a government together."

Pierre Vercauteren, politics professor at the University of Mons, called the new political consensus a "historic moment". "The conclusion of the political accord its a huge relief for Belgian people. But just because there is relief, that doesn't mean everyone is happy with the accord."

[Teebs]

Living in the 'Brussels melting pot' there have been a couple of unpleasant encounters that I've had with Flemish speakers (plenty of pleasant ones too, I'm sure) where I've been snapped at for speaking to them in French. A guy at tourist information gave me a lecture on how Flemish is the natural language of Brussels or something similar. Obviously as a non-native I'm only seeing the surface, but even I get flashes of the tension despite my isolation from Belgian politics.