For an event that had been more than a year in the preparation, the agreement on the first major stumbling block in negotiations seemed to come out of the blue. A day before, the king had been requested to return from his holiday in the south of France. Formateur Elio Di Rupo had reportedly sent the other party chairmen home on Tuesday night with the warning that the following day’s session would be the last. If no common ground could be found, the formateur was ready to throw in the towel.
In the end, the agreement covers one of the dossiers that proved impossible to resolve over the last year. The electoral district of Brussels-Halle- Vilvoorde, known as BHV, will be split.
Flemish Brabant is alone among the provinces of Belgium in not being a single electoral district. One part of the province, around Leuven, is a single district; the rest, 35 Flemish municipalities, is tacked onto the 19 communes of Brussels.
Both sets of parties stand in elections there, and the growing number of French-speaking voters in the municipalities around Brussels have become an important constituency for French-speaking parties, in particular the hard-line FDF of Olivier Maingain. The constitutional court has already declared the situation unconstitutional, so that even before the elections of June 2010, there was serious concern that the election itself was invalid. However, no agreement could be found to split the district.
• For Flanders, the ability to vote in a Flemish province for French-speaking parties is a serious anomaly: There is no corresponding right for any Fleming living in Wallonia, for example. The situation contributes to the further “Frenchification” of the periphery of Brussels.
• The constituency of Frenchspeaking voters now living in Flemish municipalities has become too important for French-speaking parties to ignore. For years there have even been calls for the six municipalities with facilities (which allow residents to obtain official documents in French, for example) to be included in a new Greater Brussels, which would then cut through Flanders to form a sort of Brussels-Walloon corridor.
• Flemings in Brussels, meanwhile, have other concerns. At present there are only two Flemish members of the federal parliament representing Brussels. They owe their seats to the votes cast for their party lists in Halle-Vilvoorde, because there are not enough Flemish voters in the capital. If Flemish parties were to present lists for Brussels alone, none would achieve the minimum level of votes needed to take a seat.
The agreement reached last week places the Halle-Vilvoorde municipalities back into the Flemish Brabant electoral district. The exception is the six facility municipalities: Kraainem, Wezembeek- Oppem, Linkebeek, Sint-Genesius- Rode, Drogenbos and Wemmel, where the option will exist to vote for Brussels lists. There is also a new procedure for dealing with cases like that of the three mayors in Linkebeek, Wezembeek- Oppem and Kraainem, whose breach of the language laws led to the Flemish government refusing to recognise their appointments; such disputes will now be dealt with by a bilingual Chamber of the Council of State.
The agreement also brings about the end of the 40 senators currently directly elected to the Senate. The number of community senators goes up from 21 to 50, 29 from the Flemish parliament, 20 from the French community and one from the German community, while senators co-opted by the parties stays at 10. The three senators ex officio – the offspring of the monarch – vanish completely.
The negotiators collectively released a statement describing “an important breakthrough obtained at a reasonable price” but stressed that “the work is far from being over”.
Flemish minister-president Kris Peeters said the agreement was “an important and essential first step in reaching a global agreement. The borders of Flanders remain intact.”
For former prime minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, “the agreement was honourable and balanced”.
Bart De Wever, president of the N-VA, which dropped out of negotiations, said that his party “had expected a lot worse. It’s not a good agreement, but it’s not a nightmare either”.
In the meantime, the party negotiators started this week on the rest of the dossiers still on the table, some of them not easier to deal with than BHV: new financing rules governing how much the regions receive, the composition of a coalition and a devolution of powers from the federal to the regional level. BHV was a first step, but there is still much work to do before a new government can be formed.
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