Rosio Pavoris a blog

But people are fucking morons upon whom democracy is wasted.

Yes, we had federal elections yesterday. I was summoned as a bijzitter, which meant I had to get up at 7 to help open a polling station and then put 1,242 stamps onto 1,242 ballots (621 each for Kamer and Senaat) and about five hundred on as many election summons (compulsory voting, dontchaknow), and I didn’t even get to keep the stamp afterwards. Then at the end we all got to wait around for two more hours because apparently the problem with selecting members of the public to help manage elections is that the vast majority of the public is terminally innumerate, so our ballot count was off by one.
It eventually got resolved, but the upshot of this is that I was too tired to bother with writing this post last night, when the votes were counted (we count more quickly than the Americans or the British or even the Dutch).

You may be wondering why we’re having federal elections in 2010 when the last time I complained about federal elections was in 2007. A lot of countries have been having elections lately, but Belgium’s wasn’t planned for another year.
The reason for that is that Alexander De Croo felt he wasn’t getting enough media attention, so he took his ball (the Flemish liberal party) and went home, thereby imploding the Leterme government for, what, the eighth time now? Even the King couldn’t pretend there was no problem this time, so in the good tradition of Christian democrat majority governments, emergency elections had to be called.⁰

You can find all results here, as usual, and as usual I don’t know how long they’ll last, so I’ll steal some graphics.

Flanders¹

It’s not all bad, so let’s start with the good news.

It’s the worst result for the Flemish Christian democrats in the history of the country. For the Kamer, CD&V went from 29.6% of the Flemish vote in 2007 to 17.3% now, going from being by far the largest party in the country to being third behind N-VA and the Walloon PS, and losing six of their 23 seats. In the Senaat, they went from 31.4% to 16.2%, losing four of their eight seats.

The second bit of good news is that Jean-Marie Dedecker’s far-right temper tantrum of a party (slash retirement home for washed-up Flemish celebrities, about which I’ve complained before), LDD, got trounced and slipped well below the electoral threshold of 5% nearly everywhere. They lose all of their Kamer seats except for one (Dedecker’s own), and never had any in de Senaat. Dedecker said he was going to quit politics if this happened, but is now backpedalling and has just “resigned” as president of the party. In fact, he’s still president until “a solution is found”. Ho hum.
I hope this means we’ll be seeing a lot less of him in the media. The party is now only marginally more popular than the Trotskyists, and they never get invited to debates or interviews or what have you.

Speaking of the Trotskyists, PVDA+² just keeps growing! In the Kamer they went from 0.9% of the Flemish vote to 1.3%, and in the Senaat from 0.9% to 1.4%! If they keep this up for another century, they may even get a representative in!

sp.a (the Flemish social democrats, of which I am a member), meanwhile, is holding relatively steady. Kamer went from 10.3% to 9.2%, and Senaat went from 16.2% to 15.3%. This seems bad, but compared to the losses suffered by every other traditional party, it’s really very good. I was certainly expecting worse. They’re now the third biggest Flemish party, behind, of course, N-VA and CD&V. Last time even Vlaams Belang was doing better than them.
It’s worth keeping in mind that for the last federal elections, sp.a was in a cartel with Spirit, another lefty social-democratic party, so maybe you could argue their losses are attributable to the fact that they’re alone now. Given the drama surrounding Spirit (now LSP; I forget what that stands for) and the fact that they got very nearly 0% of the vote now, though, I’m not sure how tenable that is.
They did slightly better than they did during the regional elections last year, anyway, even if Tienen is no longer the most socialist canton in Flanders (though for the Kamer it’s one of very few cantons where sp.a won; see map below). For the Senaat, sp.a isn’t even the most popular party here anymore (that would be, inevitably, N-VA).

Speaking of Vlaams Belang, the neo-Nazis continue the heartening slide into irrelevancy they started in the regional elections, going from 12% to 7.8% in the Kamer and 19.2% to 12.3% in the Senaat.

Groen!, the Flemish green party, actually gains a bit, going from 4% to 4.4% in the Kamer (actually gaining a seat there) and from 5.9% to 6.3% in the Senaat.

Open VLD, the Flemish liberals, lost quite a bit, going from 18.8% to 13.6% in the Kamer and 20.1% to 13.3% in the Senaat. Normally I would consider this bad news; I voted for VLD at least once before, and I still think Verhofstadt I was the best government Belgium has ever had. However, post Verhofstadt, VLD has been a ridiculous embarrassment. Alexander De Croo, who replaced Verhofstadt as party president, is an inexperienced, barely competent, smug, fils-à-papa douchebag who only got the job because Herman De Croo has been a liberal party high-up since long before it was called VLD. In addition to this, while VLD used to be centrist, lately it has swung so far to the right it is no longer a party I can support.
Verhofstadt used to be known as Baby Thatcher in the ’80s, but it wasn’t until he cleaned up and stopped being a moron that he got elected. You’d think De Croo would take a hint.

Now for the bad news: N-VA won. Overwhelmingly so.
This time it looks like it was a legitimate victory. The first time N-VA got a lot of votes because it was in a cartel with CD&V, the second time (in the regional elections) because Bart De Wever, the toad-faced party leader, was a funny man on some quiz show. This time you could put some of the blame on the reality-creating polls conducted before the elections, but you probably can’t explain away 27.8% and 31.7% of the Flemish vote like that.
These are, of course, the Flemish nationalists and separatists. Their platform reads like Vlaams Belang light (except when it comes to gays, abortion, and euthanasia, on which they just don’t have a position, because they’re a gimmick party), but even De Wever hasn’t had the spine recently to stick to the single issue the party was created for, which is Flemish independence. Instead, they’ve been waffling and pretending that they just want more autonomy for the regional governments.

It should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that separatism or increased autonomy or confederalism or whatever you want to call this bullshit is a red herring. In 2009 N-VA blamed the international economic crisis on a unified Belgium and pretended it would go away if only Flanders would become an independent nation. This election cycle the liberals did more or less the same thing, and N-VA pretended that moving social security from the federal level to the regional level would solve all of our (read: Flanders’) problems. It’s a straight-forward diversion tactic to stop people from noticing they don’t have any real policies. Sadly, it seems to work.

It’s true that Wallonia has been in an economic slump since the mines closed down, and is, compared to Flanders, basically broke. It’s also true that Flemish tax money is helping pay for social security and health care for Walloons, and that regionalising those things would mean more Flemish money is going to Flanders. However, it’s equally true that the Flemish rich are paying to support the Flemish poor, and making it so that only those who don’t need financial support could get it would mean nobody would benefit at the cost of anyone else. That’s the entire fucking point of social security and socialised medicine: the more fortunate help carry the less fortunate in their time of need, so they can get back on their feet more quickly.
Cutting off Wallonia is no different from abandoning our own poor. Yes, to a short-sighted rich person it may make sense in that he’ll be paying less in the short term; however, by pulling away the safety net (and let’s not pretend this is doing anything else), we’re also kneecapping Wallonia in its attempts at getting their shit back together. I suppose it’s possible in theory for poor regions to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but it’s almost unheard of. Wallonia’s economic recovery depends on Flemish help, just like Flanders’ economic boom was built on the back of Wallonia back when it was still the wealthier.

You might say, “So what?”. After all, why should you care about Wallonia? You might be one of the very few Flemish people who has no friends or relatives in Wallonia, or you might not give a shit about those people. I could make the usual case from compassion and charity and altruism, but fuck it; you’re too selfish to understand it, and nothing bad could ever happen to you, so you’ll never need that kind of charity from others yourself. In fact, that line of argumentation isn’t even needed.
The obvious question is, of course, how healthy it is for Flanders to border on a very poor region that is only going to get poorer. Regardless of whether Wallonia is part of Belgium or an independent nation or part of Luxembourg or France, how long is it going to be before Flanders will need a Mexican border fence along the language barrier? Even if we manage to keep all Walloons after our jobs (hah!) and health care and infrastructure and what have you out of Flanders, which would be better for us: an economically healthy Wallonia with which we could trade freely, or an economic black hole which might as well not exist?
Investing in Wallonia is the surest way to economic recovery in Flanders as well.

Suppose, however, that N-VA gets everything they want: an independent Flanders, a Wallonia that somehow doesn’t affect us at all anymore, and some magical solution for the problem of Brussels. What’s next?
There’s a lot of masturbation over the right to self-determination of ethnic groups and historical nations with a single language and cultural identity. Flanders, however, is very obviously not one of those. We all speak “Dutch”, sure; well, we do now. Historically and culturally and in many cases linguistically, however, the region now known as Flanders (and Wallonia, for that matter) is one of independent or semi-independent city states, duchies, and counties. Gent and Antwerpen and Leuven and Limburg and what have you: each of these has its own cultural identity, and its own dialect which, while certainly part of a large Dutch family, is usually unintelligible to other speakers of “Dutch”.
If a case can be made for the confederalism of the liberals or, now, N-VA, it is not on the level of the current national regions, but on the level of these much smaller units.

All of N-VA’s arguments concerning Flemish independence are equally (or even better) applicable to independence from, say, Limburg. It too is economically significantly worse off than the rest of Flanders, and it too has its own cultural identity (which, like Wallonia, it shares with a region in a different country; specifically the Dutch province of Limburg and part of Germany) and language (Limburgs, which many would argue wouldn’t even be a Dutch dialect even if it were just a dialect). Historically, it’s even been an independent state as the Duchy of Limburg, unlike Wallonia, which was never a single unified entity.
When are we going to secede from them? For how much longer must we, the successful, subsidise economic failure?

People anger me.

Anyway, it’s worth pointing out that nobody wants Flemish independence. Polls show this time and time again: nobody wants to dissolve Belgium, though most people believe it will be dissolved. Even De Wever realises this, which is why he’s been lying about N-VA’s platform. The only party serious about Flemish independence at this point is Vlaams Belang, and they only want it so they can create their Diets paradise, where speaking French will get you deported and being brown is a capital offense.

Wallonia

Meanwhile, Wallonia seems to be a lot more sensible. They’re traditionally socialist, and while the liberal MR won last time, this time the social-democratic PS is back on top going from 29.5% to 37.5% in the Kamer and 26.8% to 35.7% in the Senaat, becoming the second largest party (after N-VA, obviously) on a national level.

Front National, which is the only other Walloon party I care about, got trounced, so that’s nice.

There are rumors that PS party leader Elio Di Rupo³ will become the next prime minister, which would be nice. Compared to its Flemish counterpart, PS has a few corruption issues, but I’d still much prefer them to De Wever. We haven’t had a Walloon prime minister or a socialist one since Leburton in 1973/1974, which was before the national parties fell apart into the regional ones (the Belgian Socialist Party became the Flemish SP and the Walloon PS in 1978). I’m not holding my breath, but the fact is that N-VA is an opposition party by design (they have no real policies, unless just whining about what everyone else does counts).
There’s also the issue that N-VA (like Vlaams Belang, of course) is explicitly republican, and the King has a significant say over who becomes PM. Normally it’s bad form to suggest Albert II is anything but impartial, but given his performance with Leterme, I’m no longer inclined to pretend.
We can only hope.⁴ Either way, it’s going to take a long fucking time to put together a government.

Final conclusion: it’s bad, but not nearly as bad as it could have been, especially if Di Rupo becomes PM. I’m not moving to Finland over these elections, though I may move to Wallonia. I have some family in Nijvel, anyway.

Or Nivelles, I guess.

I don’t even speak French.

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⁰ Alright, the fuller story is that people were still whining about state reform, which still hadn’t been passed after two or three years of negotiating, because Leterme is a smug douchebag who hates the Walloons and N-VA and most recently the Flemish liberals have been obstructionist douchebags. De Croo wanted to pretend none of it was his fault (which is a lie), and he just left because he felt things were going anywhere (which may be true). Even most voters probably realised he was full of shit.

¹ For non-Belgians who might not know: Belgium has a bi-cameral federal government, and is divided into three regions: Dutch-speaking Flanders (6 million people), French-speaking Wallonia (with a tiny German-speaking bit; 3.4 million people), and theoretically-bilingual-but-practically-French-speaking Brussels (1 million). For the most part, Flemish parties only appear on Flemish ballots and Walloon parties only appear on Walloon ballots, which is why there’s really two sets of results. The exception is the electoral region Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde, which is half of the Flemish province of Flemish Brabant plus Brussels, which has both. Much of the recent drama has been about splitting that up, presumably so Brussels is its own electoral region, and Flemish Brabant is a unified region like every other province.
As for why the situation is the way it is: blame the Christian democrats.

² Not to be confused with the Dutch social-democratic PVDA, which is actually a mainstream party.

³ Son of Italian immigrants, as you may be able to tell. Until Moroccans overtook them a few years ago, Italians were the largest immigrant group in Belgium, because we imported them to work in our coal mines, mostly in Wallonia. As said, most of those ran out a while ago.

⁴ As the bow tie suggest, he is a homosexual. In Belgium that’s a non-issue, though; we’ve had gay marriage since 2003 (Verhofstadt I’s liberal/socialist government, of course), and the only party to oppose it then (and, indeed, now) was Vlaams Belang. If Di Rupo’s sexuality annoys Vlaams Belang it can only be a good thing, but even the King isn’t going to give a shit otherwise.