I know you're thinking it... "would anyone really miss it"?
Even for a country accustomed to being the butt of jokes, you can sense that Belgians are becoming increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable with its current state of affairs. For the last 100+ days, I've been watching and waiting as Belgium has failed to form a government in the wake of the (recent?) elections.
With the seat of European Union government based in the Belgian capital of Brussels, one can only wonder how this disunity is playing abroad. If Brussels can't hold it's own country together, what does this say for the expanding union of European nations!
The story has started to pick up international coverage, with the Herald Tribune recently chiming in:
"...the back story of this flat country of 10.4 million is of a bad marriage writ large - two nationalities living together that cannot stand each other. Now, more than three months after a general election, Belgium has failed to create a government, producing a crisis so profound that it has led to a flood of warnings, predictions, even promises that the country is about to disappear."
The Economist even cheekily suggested that it might be "time to call it a day".The split could be descibed as cultural, as it exists between the Flemish speaking north (Flanders) and the French speaking southern region (Walloonia). As with most political schisms, history and economics play their role as well. Walloonia has seen its fortunes decline as its mining industry gradually closed shop, a jarring contrast with the strong economy of Flanders.
Up until the past week, I had been willing to dismiss this as another game of regional political brinksmanship which would resolve itself after the requisite posturing and speech making.
100 days without a national government, however, and what was once a joke no longer seems quite so amusing...
|