The election results from Belgium are the usual mess: there are two sets of political parties, which hate each other on linguistic as well as political grounds. Because of proportional representation, this means a compromise of morals, beliefs and meaning.
At this time it is not clear whether the French speaking socialist leader will agree to let the Flemish speaking socialist become the new prime minister, or whether the Flemish free-market liberals will do a deal with the Flemish socialists and retain the leading position in government.
Either way, it looks like more cuts in public spending and taxes, with the outgoing coalition partners (the Greens) having taken a big electoral kick up the backside. The Flemish Greens, appear to have lost all their seats to the Vlaams Blok, a party which campaigns for Flemish independence and against ‘mass-immigration’.
The next government will continue to implement the Euro-bank’s economic policies (a big improvement on any Belgian policy since … who knows?). This means that the opposition nationalists combine breaking up Belgium and effectively the European Union. With any luck, next time the Belgians vote the European Commision will have to pack up and move to Warsaw.
It’s interesting that the left is now starting to agitate about a medium that is out of big-media control. I’m a journalist and many other journalists are bloggers amd blog readers — some of them quite well known. And if Al Gore can have a blog, surely anyone can.
Mr Thompson is not the first person to start whining about unexpected points of view being expressed after he and others who think like him had gone to such a lot of trouble to stigmatise plain speech in political terms, in order to suppress certain kinds of expression.
He will have to start learning to live in this rude and non-PC world that has begun to flourish since the events of 9/11 — the day cold sanity once again dawned on most people.
And he will have to learn to defend his opinions, something he and the rest of that tired old mob thought they would never need to do again. Their comfort zone is gone.
Er, that post belongs with David Carr’s comments immediately below the Brussels piece. Can’t work out how that happened, sorry.
So the Belgians, leaders of European Unification have difficulties keeping Belgium united ?
Nitpick: The Flemish Greens most likely lost their seats to the Socialists, who made substantial gains. The Vlaams Blok gained a few seats (and IIRC have 18 out of 150 seats), but will still be censored by Radio Vlaanderen Internationaal.
At any rate, it’s good to see populists of the left taking it on the chin.
I wouldn’t gamble on even Belgian pettiness being enough to drive out Wallonnia’s and Flanders’ biggest source of unearned income…. EU officials expense-account-lunching all over town, bigger even than having lots of NATO officials expense-account-lunching all over town.
Antoine,
The socialists gained seats in the election and you then say: “… it looks like more cuts in public spending and taxes.”
Usually tax and spending cuts aren’t associated with socialists. Could you explain Belgium politics a bit more?
yes