Friday March 12 2010 02:20
-2°C / 5°C
“Freya” is one of those people about whom everyone has an opinion. Her political career got a kick-start after her obvious talent (and model looks) were spotted in a political TV show. She became a federal minister in 2003, only three years after her first steps into the political arena. By 2005, she was the socialist viceprime minister and federal budget minister. Even her own father said that was too much, too soon.
It is up to the Flemish government to decide on the new Scheldt crossing. Will it involve the BAM solution, which includes the much-debated Oosterweel viaduct? Or will it be the Arup/Sum route, which uses tunnels as an alternative? This in itself is an extremely hard decision to make, but it is complicated further by the fact that there is a lot at stake for every coalition party.
The number of people that took part had not been seen since the early 1980s, when many hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Brussels during peace demonstrations. The peace marches came to mind again last week when four ministers of state, including two former prime ministers, one former head of Nato and one former European commissioner, called for the removal of nuclear weapons from Europe. According to the four – Jean-Luc Dehaene, Guy Verhofstadt, Willy Claes and Louis Michel – the American tactical weapons no longer make any military sense.
Within his party, Vandenbroucke formed a seemingly unbeatable team with Steve Stevaert, Johan Vande Lanotte and Patrick Janssens. This was new to him, as Vandenbroucke has always managed to alienate the people close to him. As party president, the ascetic ways he introduced enervated his older colleagues. He was also known as the professor, forever lecturing about what he thinks is right for this country.
From the end of the 19th century up until the 1950s, most of rural Flanders was dirt poor. No less than 500,000 people left for Wallonia, to work in coal mines and steel mills or on large farms. Most of them never returned. At first, the Flemish were looked down upon in Wallonia, but over the years they have completely integrated.
Peumans is a colorful character and a staunch Flemish nationalist. Shortly before the regional elections, political journalists voted him “best Flemish MP”, which filled him with pride. When the nationalist party N-VA entered the Flemish government, Peumans was a ministerial hopeful, but in the end his party put forward the newcomer Philippe Muyters. This saddened Peumans, but not for long. There was, after all, work to be done in the Flemish Parliament.
The Christian Democrat has been given a royal assignment to find a solution to the seemingly unsolvable issue of Brussels- Halle-Vilvoorde (BHV) – the bilingual constituency that threatens this country’s linguistic equilibrium. With Dehaene’s formidable reputation, it is no wonder that the king thought of him as practically the only person who could lift this millstone from the federal government’s neck.
Last week, for instance, De Wever announced that he did not want state reform before the federal elections of 2011. A weird twist, because state reform is the very reason N-VA exists. In essence, it is a separatist party, but it believes in evolution rather than revolution. Step by step, state reform by state reform, is how N-VA want Flanders to become independent (which is why French speakers fear these state reforms so much).
In his latest interviews, he asked every level of government to co-operate in battling the economic crisis. He called for a “co-operative federalism”, a term that echoed the “fighting federalism” that his predecessor Herman Van Rompuy condemned and that seemed to describe somewhat the attitude of the “old” Leterme.
Leterme claims that he has not changed at all. It is the circumstances that prompt him to take on this new stand. And, he says, in the 2007 federal election campaign, he never focused on “communitarian” issues.
We have national elections every four years, regional elections every five years (held on the same day as the European elections) and local elections every six years. In practice this means that we elected the Flemish Parliament in 2009, will elect the federal parliament in 2011 and in 2012 there will be local elections. No wonder everyone looks forward to the break!
Flanders Today is an independent weekly newsmagazine about Flanders
