Snap Belgian election deepens political divide

Jun 13, 2010, 23:18 GMT

Brussels - Belgium's snap election on Sunday deepened the country's political divide as voters in Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia voted for diametrically opposing parties.

The elections came a year ahead of schedule after the government fell in a power struggle between Dutch- and French-speaking parties. The result appeared likely to intensify the struggle, shifting power from centrist to more strident parties.

'A right-wing party wins in Flanders and a left-wing one in Wallonia ... There will be difficult negotiations,' predicted Mark Eyskens, a leading member of Dutch-language conservative party CD&V.

With 85 per cent of votes in, the Flemish nationalist party, N-VA, scored a stunning win, garnering 18.63 per cent of the vote and an estimated 30 seats out of 150 in the national parliament, 22 seats more than in 2007.

'We are making history today,' N-VA's leader, Bart De Wever, announced as he claimed victory for his party.

   The N-VA wants to replace the current federal state with a loose confederation of Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, ending Brussels' special status as an autonomous region.

   'The people of Flanders have voted for change. We will not disappoint them,' De Wever said, promising to 'build bridges' to other parties around the country.

In Wallonia, meanwhile, the socialist party (PS) ended a long electoral slump to become the province's top party with 11.49 per cent of the vote, knocking the liberals into a distant second.

'Tonight, the socialists have become the biggest political party in Belgium again, after 20 years of waiting,' PS leader Elio Di Rupo said triumphantly. Together, the PS and their Flemish sister party, sp.a, garnered 21 per cent of the vote, the largest share of a single political family in Belgium.

The PS campaigned on a programme of reinforcing the federal state and strengthening and enlarging the Brussels region.

PS voters have 'opted for a society of solidarity, where every person can take care of himself, of others, of our country and of our planet,' an ebullient Di Rupo said.

For the last three years, Belgium has been governed by a five- party coalition of the PS and the French- and Dutch-speaking liberals and conservatives, with N-VA in opposition.

But N-VA's rise was matched by sharp falls in all the PS' coalition parties, leading commentators across the political spectrum to conclude that an N-VA-led government would be inevitable.

It will be all but impossible to form a stable government without the N-VA, fallen prime minister Yves Leterme said.

De Wever was quick to offer an olive branch to Walloons, saying that he wanted to 'stretch out a hand' to French-speakers and insisting that it was 'not the end' of Belgium.

But at the same time, he repeated earlier calls to take power from the federal state and give more to the regions, something which French-speaking commentators see as one step short of separatism.

Di Rupo and De Wever are now expected to launch informal coalition talks within days. Those talks are equally widely expected to be complex and long-lasting.

Time, however, is critical: Belgium is set to take over the European Union's rotating presidency on July 1, leaving just two weeks for talks if the country is to avoid taking the EU's helm with a caretaker administration.

The elections also brought a severe reverse to Flanders' xenophobic, Islamophobic and Wallonophobic party, Vlaams Belang ('Flemish interest'), which saw its share of the vote fall from 12 per cent to just over 8 per cent.

Analysts said that many of the party's former voters had defected to the N-VA, whose campaign lacked Vlaams Belang's racist overtones.